i Just installed mandrake linux 8.1 and i love it it installed it on a dell inspioion 3800 notebook 600mhz, 256mb RAM, 10 gig HD. anywayz i have had some VERY little time on a friends slackware box and i learned the the file basics but not much else. So far no problems with linux except the less command and the man pages act really funny. When i type "man ls" or any other type of man page i get every Aplication in /usr/bin printed out like
"/usr/bin/less: aXXXXX*:command not found"
"/usr/bin/less: aXXXXX*:command not found"
"/usr/bin/less: bXXXXX*:command not found"
"/usr/bin/less: XXXXXX*:command not found"

about 1500 of them little buggers and about 700 lines down is the full "man ls" page printed out

and at the end of all the lines

it says:

System command (cd/usr/share/man && (echo ".11 11.4i"; echo ".pl 1100i"; /usr/bin/bzip2 -c -d '/usr/share/man/man1/ls.1.bz2'; echo; echo ".pl \n(nlu+10") | /usr/bin/gtbl | /usr/bin/nroff -mandoc | /usr/bin/less -isrr) exited with status 127.
No manual entry for ls

But it already printed out the man page in the middle of the 1500 lines "/usr/bin/less: XXXXXX*:command not found"

the same happend when i try to use the "less" command
i got the 1500 lines and but no man or error

Never heard of this one before, but here's a shot in the dark. Have you looked to make sure that the less command is installed. If I remember correctly, man commands pipe things out to less, so if you didn't have less installed, it'd get confused.

i found out what was wrong while trying to learn piping i accidentally replaced the less file with the file names of /usr/bin

now how do i change less to the way it was

You did what? How did you do this? Did you type something like dosomething > less instead of dosomething | less? I think the easiest way would be to delete the less command itself, then re-install the fileutils. If you do a search on RPMFIND for less, you should come up with the relavent RPM.