How does man know?

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <2674 at crdgw1.crd.ge.com> barnett at crdgw1.crd.ge.com (Bruce Barnett) writes:
>In fact, Doug, I haven't noticed any inconvenience in man automatically
>calling PAGER if the output device is a tty.

I certainly have.  But then I normally have pagination, scrolling,
etc. handled by my terminal where it belongs instead of requiring
every outputting utility to have it built in.

>IMHO the BSD solution was right. It favors the beginner and lets
>the advanced user work around the default behavior.

I think it is counterproductive to try to target novices and
programming professionals in the same user interface.  UNIX's
shell environment was designed for the latter, and requires
adherence to the toolkit design philosophy for best effect.
Interfaces for naive users should be considerably different
from the normal UNIX shell command environment!