unwanted control characters in downloads

[Steve Gombosi]

Pipe the "man" output through "col" as in:

  man mumble | col -b > mumble_file

col will strip out all the whizbang backspace formatting stuff.
Some "man" programs have parameters which cause them not to produce
the backspace sequences. Other versions of "man" do not generate these
sequences when writing to a file. This varies from manufacturer to
manufacturer -- I think that this lack of consistency is what they mean
by "open systems" :-).