Always pipe output of man to less

ahtoot · 03-06-2009, 05:32 AM

How do I always pipe the output of man to less? Currently the my man pages are formatted with more, and I always have to do the following:

Code:

man ls | less

Thanks.

lugoteehalt · 03-06-2009, 05:40 AM

Personally I'd do a shell script:

Quote:

#!/bin/bash
# usage m <ls, say>
man $1|less
exit 0

and save it as m

Code:

$ chmod a+x /path/m

and put in on your PATH. Maybe $1 in line 3 should be `echo "$1"` or something, God knows.

ahtoot · 03-06-2009, 05:57 AM

Thanks that worked very nicely.

I was wondering if I could still use the command man. I tried renaming m to man but that didn't work out. Would aliases work? I'm not sure how, if it's even possible, to place command line arguments into aliases.

ilikejam · 03-06-2009, 06:32 AM

No need for any of that.

Just set the 'PAGER' variable to 'less':
$ export PAGER=less
$ man man

Dave

lugoteehalt · 03-07-2009, 05:26 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ahtoot

Thanks that worked very nicely.

I was wondering if I could still use the command man. I tried renaming m to man but that didn't work out. Would aliases work? I'm not sure how, if it's even possible, to place command line arguments into aliases.

ilikejam is presumably correct, but for the purposes of argument or whatever it might be possible to alias a function, don't know:

Code:

f () { man `echo "$1"`|less; }

or whatever worked for the shell script.

Err....I'm a bit Mutley-esque about this: "Thanks that worked very nicely."....