MANPAGER=/usr/bin/less -isM... M, I said!!
 

I edited .bashrc to export -isM. No dice. So naturally, editing /etc/profile to include -isM didn't work. Nor did just -M. Not even running man with the command line -P switch. I did a web search and turned up nothing. Searched two boards and got back 2 results at each, none of which were relevant. Any help?

All I want is

foo lines 1-23/389 2%

instead of

lines 1-23

I hate not knowing if I'm opening a man *page* or a man *book* and whether I can take the time to read the whole thing or need to make some major time to do so. I could get the filesize or scroll to the end or whatever, but it's the principle of the thing. Why does something as simple as this not work? Is man even using less? The man pages and environment variables says it is and I got an error when I tried zless for the hell of it.

While I'm at it, is there any reason I can't delete all the internationalized man pages in /usr/man? Wasting space, extending search times, and utterly useless to me. Thanks.

Isn't your lesspipe defined in /etc/profile.d/less.* ?

Nope. But it is in /usr/bin. (lesspipe.sh.) I don't understand this. If it's using a preprocessor, that means less can't know how big the file is, as it's being piped on the fly. But if I disable the script or unset the environmental variable, it looks like I'd screw up all kinds of things.

Thanks for letting me know I was barking up a wrong tree (I should have figured it out myself but seem remarkably brain damaged lately) but I'm still not sure what I should do. More or less or zmore or zless or lessopen or profile or bashrc or PAGER or MANPAGER or LESSPIPE or.... or... or... Anyway, as far as I can tell, it's a preprocessor that clobbers any switch I want to add, but I don't see how to edit the script or work around it properly.

The longer I try to use Linux the more I hate it.