Ansi escape sequences showing in Man pages

mwoehlke mwoehlke@tibco.com
Thu Aug 10 00:24:00 GMT 2006


No http://cygwin.com/acronyms/#TOFU please, and 
http://cygwin.com/acronyms/#PCYMTNQREAIYR... thanks!

jbonnett@sola.com.au wrote:
> Igor Peshansky wrote:
>> On Wed, 9 Aug 2006, jbonnett wrote:
>>> I am having a problem where escape sequences, rather than colour
>>> highlighting, appear when I display man pages.
>>> [snip]
>>>
>>> Any clues about what to check to fix this on my work machine?
>>
>> Unset PAGER.
> 
> Unset PAGER did not fix things, but after reading some man pages on the
> Internet, I discovered a way to make things work for me.
> 
> PAGER="less -r"
> Export PAGER
> 
> After that I get readable highlighted man pages.

Hmm, you shouldn't have to do that. What is the output of the following 
commands (with PAGER and MANPAGER unset)?

$ unset PAGER ; unset MANPAGER # no output, but do this first
$ man -d man 2>&1 | tail -n 1 # what man thinks it is doing
$ grep PAGER /usr/share/misc/man.conf # what man is being told to use

(note: '#' and things after are comments; you don't need to type them)

You should get something like:
$ unset PAGER ; unset MANPAGER
$ man -d man
  (cd "/usr/share/man" && (echo ".pl 11i"; /usr/bin/cat 
'/usr/share/man/man1/man.1') | /usr/bin/tbl | /usr/bin/nroff -c -mandoc 
2>/dev/null | /usr/bin/less -isrR)
$ grep PAGER /usr/share/misc/man.conf
PAGER        /usr/bin/less -isrR

...mostly you are looking for sane arguments (-r in particular) being 
given to 'less'. If not, you may need to edit /usr/share/man.conf, 
although I would be curious to know how your man.conf got to having a 
bad PAGER (if that turns out to be the problem).

-- 
Matthew
This is not the list you're looking for. -- Perversion of Obi Wan


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