show man pages in terminal without a pager

Question

man defaults to using a pager. For short pages, I want to just echo them to the terminal without paging. I'm on OS X. Things I've tried:

man -t man                  #produces PostScript output
man man | groff -T latin1   #readable, but line wraps badly
man man | troff -a          #readable, but ... interesting ...
man man | echo              #no output

Better offers?

score 9 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 12 '15 at 12:56

9

You won't get formatting, but you can set the pager to be simply cat:

man man -P cat

Also, man won't format when piped, which is why the following gets you the same result:

man man | cat

answered Sep 12 '15 at 12:56

Arjan

31,511

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 19 '17 at 14:19

5

To expand on on Arjan's Answer, you can get formatting using cat as a pager if you pipe it to ul:

man foo -P cat | ul

answered Aug 19 '17 at 14:19

bowmasters

155

score 3 · Answer 3 · answered May 12 '20 at 09:27

I fact I went a different route because I realised my 'real problem' was with less clearing the screen on exit. I put

export MANPAGER='/usr/bin/less -isXF'

in my startup profile. The -X parameter means that when I quit less, whatever part of the man page was on screen, stays there.

show man pages in terminal without a pager

3 Answers3