Re: Searching manpages for option codes, e.g. "--all"

[Tim McDaniel <tmcd at panix dot com>]

On Tue, 29 Nov 2011, carolus wrote:
> After opening "man ls", trying to search for "--all" leads to
> "Pattern not found (press RETURN)".

My experiment agrees with that.  Do you know why that happens -- what
is it doing so "/--all" doesn't work?

> Inquiring on comp.unix.shell, I was told that for this kind of
> search to work properly in linux , one must set PAGER=less. However,
> that does not seem to work in Cygwin, at least using the old default
> terminal. Is there a workaround?

Whether in an older default terminal or the new one, I've never had a
problem with
    PAGER=/usr/bin/less
    export PAGER
I do them as separate statements because older Bourne shells do not
allow the combined form
    export PAGER=/usr/bin/less
But bash does.

Further, on my system with little customization, the default man pager
is less anyway, so (for example)
    man ls
invokes less anyway.

--
Tim McDaniel, tmcd@panix.com

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