The Man: What manual page do you want? prompt

[wrkn]

Hi,

I have been running 11.2 for a while now and I really like it so far. I have been able to get rid of the command_not_found_handler, but now I would also like to get rid of the "What manual page do you want?" prompt.

I prefer the old behaviour where it just displays the first page. The other pages are usually listed in the SEE ALSO section of the manpage, and I can use man -aw to find them. Is there an alias I can use or something I can put in $MANOPTS?

Also, the man (1) manpage states:

The default action is to search in all of the available
sections, following a pre-defined order and to show only the first page
found, even if page exists in several sections.

This is only true if I do:

$ man man | less

but not for

$ man man

[KrelisK]

The "command not found"package and this broken man-behavior are two great annoyances. Thankfully, they're easily fixed, or worked around. Commandnotfound can be uninstalled, and until man is repaired to function as intended you can work around it by creating a function and placing it in your .bashrc :

function man { /usr/bin/man "$@" | /usr/bin/less ;}

fixes the behavior, and even gives you a pager for (for instance) man -k.

If you do not want a pager for man -k, you can use the shorter solution suggested by a colleague:

function man() { /usr/bin/man "$@" < /dev/zero ;}

Cheers,
Krelis Krotenkoker

[Tilman Schmidt]

Am 07.04.2010 15:16 schrieb KrelisK:
>
> The "command not found"package and this broken man-behavior are two
> great annoyances.

Indeed.

> Commandnotfound can be uninstalled,

Thanks for the hint. A simple "sudo rpm -e command-not-found"
has made my opensuse experience a much bigger lot of fun. :-)

> and until man is repaired to
> function as intended you can work around it by creating a function and
> placing it in your .bashrc :
>
> function man { /usr/bin/man "$@" | /usr/bin/less ;}

That works when I enter the man command myself. Unfortunately, it
doesn't help with programs that run man internally, such as "git help":

ts@xenon:~/kernel/linux-2.6> git help rebase
Man: find all matching manual pages
* git-rebase (1)
git-rebase (1+) Forward-port local commits to the updated upstream head
git-rebase (1+)
Man: Welche Manual-Seite wollen Sie haben?
Man:

(My biggest annoyance, because the recommended way of installing git
causes all its manpages to exist multiple times on the system, and
git being what it is, I need its help function very frequently.)

Has anyone created a Bugzilla entry for this problem? A search on "man"
for product "openSUSE 11.2" yielded nothing.

Thanks,
Tilman

[KrelisK]

Am 07.04.2010 15:16 schrieb KrelisK:[color=blue]
That works when I enter the man command myself. Unfortunately, it
doesn't help with programs that run man internally, such as "git help":

I accidentally stumbled upon the following in the release-notes for SLES11:
MAN_POSIXLY_CORRECT=1;export MAN_POSIXLY_CORRECT
will restore man-functionality to what it should be.
cheers,
Krelis Krotenkoker