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ahtoot

03-06-2009 05:32 AM

Always pipe output of man to less

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 (Post 3466752)

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."....:D

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