Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!gem.mps.ohio-state.edu!ginosko!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!psuvax1!gatech!udel!rochester!uhura.cc.rochester.edu!ur-valhalla!deke From: deke@ee.rochester.edu (Dikran Kassabian) Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions Subject: Re: How does man know? Keywords: more, io redirection Message-ID: <1989Sep28.205332.1469@ee.rochester.edu> Date: 28 Sep 89 20:53:32 GMT References: <319@massey.ac.nz> <11170@smoke.BRL.MIL> <592@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> Reply-To: deke@ee.rochester.edu (Dikran Kassabian) Organization: University of Rochester Department of Electrical Engineering Lines: 31 In article <592@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen) writes: >In article <11170@smoke.BRL.MIL>, gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn) writes: > >| You're right, of course. >| Somebody thought it would be "convenient" for the command to alter >| its behavior based on what the implementor thought the usage would be. >| Thereby demonstrating once again that Earth people are stupid, stupid, >| stupid. > > And guess what? It *is* convenient to have it work that way. If I >need a copy of the man page in a file I can say "man foo >file" and not >have to guess when it's waiting for me to hit return. If I want to use >my own pager for some reason I can "man foo | mypage" and it works. Well, yes, it is convenient. But I can imagine other convenient methods that would work *and* be consistant with the (sometimes elusive) UNIX philosophy. Think of man(1) as being a simple interface to a database, namely /usr/man. When using this interface, it might be understood that a screen pager will be used. In places where any sort of indirection is required, one might use another interface to the database. If you have preformatted pages in /usr/man/cat[1-8], then cat(1) is certainly an option. If not, then the proper selection and combination of the formatter (probably [nt]roff) and other utilities like grep or sed could be used. I'm not disagreeing with bill davidsen. I like the way man(1) works, day to day. But I do admit that its probably 'wrong'. ^Deke Kassabian, deke@ee.rochester.edu or ur-valhalla!deke Univ of Rochester, Dept of EE, Rochester, NY 14627 (+1 716-275-3106)