man redirect error

[Nellis, Kenneth]

On Wed, 2012-01-04 at 08:51 -0600, Thrall, Bryan wrote:

> Perhaps the OP was looking for something like apropos or whatis?
> 
> <snip/>

In this case, the OP was simply using "head" as an example to
show how piping the output of man was generating an unexpected
error. As you all know, Unix is rich in text processing tools,
so it shouldn't be a surprise that one might want to do some
processing of man output. Further experimentation with piping
man output suggests that the error presents itself when the
process receiving the man output stream terminates (as with 
head) before man is done writing it.

--Ken Nellis