How does man know?

[Richard Tobin]

In article <11182 at smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn at brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn) writes:
>No, it isn't.  One can easily add pagination in those cases where it
>is desired, but it's much more difficult to defeat wired-in pagination
>in those cases where it isn't desired.

In what way more difficult?  If pagination is done when the output is
a tty, then pagination can be defeated by piping through cat.  This is
just as easy as adding pagination by piping through more, and for man
the paginating version is much the most common.

However, I would advise people writing such "context sensitive" programs
to provide a flag that ensures uniform behaviour.

-- Richard

-- 
Richard Tobin,                       JANET: R.Tobin at uk.ac.ed             
AI Applications Institute,           ARPA:  R.Tobin%uk.ac.ed at nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
Edinburgh University.                UUCP:  ...!ukc!ed.ac.uk!R.Tobin