How does man know?

[Bruce Barnett]

In article <11182 at smoke.BRL.MIL>, gwyn at smoke (Doug Gywn) writes:

>Consider "man whatever > /dev/tty_printer".  Why should that try to
>paginate?

Good point. But I've never had that problem.
I would either use

	man whatever|lpr
	man -t whatever

Much easier to type.

If you insist on sending it to a serial port without pagination, type

	man - whatever >/dev/tty_printer

(Works on SunOS 4.0)

In fact, Doug, I haven't noticed any inconvenience in man automatically
calling PAGER if the output device is a tty. The opposite case causes problems
also.

Imagine the beginner typing

	man more

because they don't know what more(1) is.
At the next prompt, they still don't know! :-)

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

Forcing the beginner to work around the default behavior is wrong.
Especially with the manual pages!

--
Bruce G. Barnett	<barnett at crd.ge.com>   uunet!crdgw1!barnett