Searching manpages for option codes, e.g. "--all"

[carolus]

On 11/29/2011 3:56 PM, Tim McDaniel wrote:
> On Tue, 29 Nov 2011, carolus wrote:
>> After opening "man ls", trying to search for "--all" leads to
>> "Pattern not found (press RETURN)".
>
> My experiment agrees with that. Do you know why that happens -- what
> is it doing so "/--all" doesn't work?
>

No idea.  Apparently "man" invokes $PAGER, and in linux, "less" works as 
desired and "more" does not.  If you look at the .1 file, the option 
codes are scrambled with a lot of formatting codes that must be stripped 
out or ignored for search to work.


> Whether in an older default terminal or the new one, I've never had a
> problem with
> PAGER=/usr/bin/less
> export PAGER

You can set it, but that doesn't help.

> Further, on my system with little customization, the default man pager
> is less anyway, so (for example)
> man ls
> invokes less anyway.
>
Which explains why setting PAGER doesn't help in Cygwin.



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