How can I force the man
command to not use a pager, and instead output the whole manpage at once and keep all highlighting?
If I use man -P cat
or man | cat
, I lose highlighting.
How can I force the man
command to not use a pager, and instead output the whole manpage at once and keep all highlighting?
If I use man -P cat
or man | cat
, I lose highlighting.
Long reading of manuals for man, less, groff and grotty finally gave me answer
Highlighting by default is made using backspace sequences: c\bc
=> bold c, _\bc
=> underlined c. But if output as is using cat as pager just outputs plain c in both cases. Also blank lines are squeezed, so to do all this, pager must be set to ul | cat -s
.
Pager can be set in many ways:
using MANPAGER or PAGER variables (MANPAGER is better as PAGER affects not only man command)
export MANPAGER='ul | cat -s'
in man.conf
PAGER ul | cat -s
using -P parameter
cat -P 'ul | cat -s' …
or
alias man='man -P "ul | cat -s"'
man -P ul <command>
. Ubuntu 12.04.2.
man man
...
PAGER A program to use for interactively delivering
man's output to the screen. If not set,
`more -s' is used. See more(1).
Which means the pager is regulated by PAGER env. variable, Thus just define PAGER as
setenv PAGER cat
and enjoy.
$ PAGER=cat man foobar
.
cat
as a pager essentially the same thing as not using a pager at all?
man -P ul
or PAGER=ul man
works. TIL about ul…
Feb 19, 2014 at 9:28
Alternatively, there's always the -P
switch:
man -P cat foo
This is not exactly what you want (you won't get the output in the console) but you could generate a dvi file with the content of a manual as explained in man's man:
man -l -Tdvi ./foo.1x.gz > ./foo.1x.dvi
This command will decompress and format the nroff source manual page ./foo.1x.gz into a device independent (dvi) file. The redi‐ rection is necessary as the -T flag causes output to be directed to stdout with no pager. The output could be viewed with a program such as xdvi or further processed into PostScript using a program such as dvips.
I've just tested this and opened the dvi file with evince: the highlighting is not lost.