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Date: Mon, 22 Nov 2004 23:57:53 -0500
From: Aaron Miller <amiller AT connext DOT net>
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To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: Manual page width is fixed and I'd like it not to be
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[forgot to reply to list; sorry about that]

...

>>
>> Well, that's not a full bug report, since man uses a cached cat page if
>> it's present.  So, unless your system doesn't have the cat directories,
>> you need to run "man -c" to force regeneration of cat pages.  That 
>> said, I
>> confirm that "MANWIDTH=20 man -c man" still produces an 80-column 
>> manpage.
>> But then, hey, it doesn't work on Linux (RedHat 9) either.  We must be
>> misreading the man manpage. :-)
>> Igor
> 
> 
> I tried man on my SuSE 9.1 Linux and it (1) follows the size of the
> xterm automatically and (2) follows the $MANWIDTH directive as well.
> 
> R

Thanks to all of you for your help! I'm thinking about taking a hack at
the 'man' source some time soon, but I also am not much of a C
programmer, so I don't expect to make any real headway. Might be fun,
though.

On the other hand, I note that the 'man' on one of the systems at work
does respect both $MANWIDTH ('MANWIDTH=20 man -c man') and the width of
the terminal window (xterm, bash, cmd.exe). On that system, 'uname -a' says:

Linux (host) 2.4.25-grsec #4 Thu Mar 25 01:15:52 EST 2004 i686 unknown

and 'man -v' says 'man' is version 1.5j there.

I was told that that machine was running Red Hat 7.3, but I'm not
certain about that and I don't know how much it helps anyway; I may see
about obtaining sources and maybe something can be figured out.

Anyway, thanks again for the information and also for giving me time to
explain what I ought to've made clearer in my first email.

-- Aaron


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