How can I make the man command not use a pager?

Question

How can I force the man command to not use a pager, and instead output the whole manpage at once and keep all highlighting?

If I use man -P cat or man | cat, I lose highlighting.

Answer 1

Long reading of manuals for man, less, groff and grotty finally gave me answer

Highlighting by default is made using backspace sequences: c\bc => bold c, _\bc => underlined c. But if output as is using cat as pager just outputs plain c in both cases. Also blank lines are squeezed, so to do all this, pager must be set to ul | cat -s.

Pager can be set in many ways:

1. using MANPAGER or PAGER variables (MANPAGER is better as PAGER affects not only man command)

   export MANPAGER='ul | cat -s'
   

2. in man.conf

   PAGER       ul | cat -s
   

3. using -P parameter

   cat -P 'ul | cat -s' …
   

   or

   alias man='man -P "ul | cat -s"'
   

Answer 2

man man

...
    PAGER          A program to use for interactively delivering
                        man's  output  to  the  screen.   If not set,
                        `more -s' is used.  See more(1).

Which means the pager is regulated by PAGER env. variable, Thus just define PAGER as

setenv PAGER cat

and enjoy.

Answer 3

Alternatively, there's always the -P switch:

man -P cat foo

Answer 4

This is not exactly what you want (you won't get the output in the console) but you could generate a dvi file with the content of a manual as explained in man's man:

man -l -Tdvi ./foo.1x.gz > ./foo.1x.dvi

This command will decompress and format the nroff source manual page ./foo.1x.gz into a device independent (dvi) file. The redi‐ rection is necessary as the -T flag causes output to be directed to stdout with no pager. The output could be viewed with a program such as xdvi or further processed into PostScript using a program such as dvips.

I've just tested this and opened the dvi file with evince: the highlighting is not lost.