Open man-page with less

Question

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How to let man utility to use less to display manual rather than more?

How can i open up the Man-page for a command with the less-editor?

Alternatively, how can i find the man-page on the harddrive

I've tried using the manpath command but that doesn't seem to exist on solaris. Maybe there is a command to search for the manpage somehow?

score 7 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 02 '12 at 09:54

7

Just add export PAGER=less in your .profile or .bashrc or whatever initialization file your shell use.

MANPATH is the variable used by man to find out manual pages.

answered Oct 02 '12 at 09:54

jlliagre

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 02 '12 at 09:27

2

The man command uses less by default. See man man (hehe). If yours doesn't, you could simply use a pipe like this.

man myCommand | less

answered Oct 02 '12 at 09:27

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 02 '12 at 09:41

This should give you the path to the man page file:

man -d $ANY_MANPAGE 2>&1 >/dev/null|grep '^found ultimate'

From the man page:

   -d, --debug
          Print debugging information.

So,

man -d $ANY_MANPAGE 2>&1 >/dev/null

gives you a lot of information (the remainder of the command suppresses the actual man page and redirects debugging to stdout).

$ man -d man

[...]
found ultimate source file /usr/share/man/man1/man.1.gz

3 Answers3