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

[Tim McDaniel]

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

--
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple