Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!crdgw1!crdgw1.ge.com!barnett From: barnett@crdgw1.crd.ge.com (Bruce Barnett) Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions Subject: Re: How does man know? Keywords: more, io redirection Message-ID: <2674@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> Date: 29 Sep 89 15:08:52 GMT References: <319@massey.ac.nz> <11170@smoke.BRL.MIL> <592@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> <11182@smoke.BRL.MIL> Sender: news@crdgw1.crd.ge.com Reply-To: barnett@crdgw1.crd.ge.com (Bruce Barnett) Organization: GE Corp. R & D, Schenectady, NY Lines: 38 In-reply-to: gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gywn) In article <11182@smoke.BRL.MIL>, gwyn@smoke (Doug Gywn) writes: >Consider "man whatever > /dev/tty_printer". Why should that try to >paginate? Good point. But I've never had that problem. I would either use man whatever|lpr man -t whatever Much easier to type. If you insist on sending it to a serial port without pagination, type man - whatever >/dev/tty_printer (Works on SunOS 4.0) In fact, Doug, I haven't noticed any inconvenience in man automatically calling PAGER if the output device is a tty. The opposite case causes problems also. Imagine the beginner typing man more because they don't know what more(1) is. At the next prompt, they still don't know! :-) IMHO the BSD solution was right. It favors the beginner and lets the advanced user work around the default behavior. Forcing the beginner to work around the default behavior is wrong. Especially with the manual pages! -- Bruce G. Barnettuunet!crdgw1!barnett