To paraphrase myself on freebsd-questions: "What an interesting night of experimentation." Most of this post has already been tubified on the mailing list, but I want to get down some details, and make sure I can easily find the information later.
A small irritation about FreeBSD is man does not automatically adjust
its line-length to account for the number of columns currently displayed
in a particular xterm. So, after weeks of intermittent frustration and
small, aborted attempts to determine why I couldn't get the man to do
what I wanted, I decided a concerted effort was worth my time (that, and
I asked for help ;)).
My goal was to have man whatever automatically adjust line-lenths
based on the number of columns on the display device. Unexpectedly,
after the initial flurry of emails with information leading toward a
solution, the fix was the work of a single night.
The first solution was the following shell script.
dave@heffalump:~$ cat bin/man.sh
#!/bin/sh
mpage=`man -w $1`
tcols=`stty -a | grep columns | awk '{ print $6 }'`
zcat -f `man -w $1` | groff -Tutf8 -man -rIN=7n -rLL=`echo ${tcols} - 3 | bc`n - | less
The shell script above does the minimum - it adjusts the line-length of a given man page based on the number of columns being displayed. However, there were multiple problems.
man -kwas unusable- my fingers kept typing
man -k
Ok... maybe only one problem. Regardless, the lack of man -k was an
irritant I'd not suffer gladly.
Knowing man adjusted line-length based on columns on FreeBSD-CURRENT
caused me to look at the difference between man in HEAD and 8.1-RELEASE,
where I discovered the man from HEAD is a shell script! Woohoo! That
inspired a second solution: Take the shell script from HEAD, and install
it for my user's use. That wasn't a complete solution, as apparently
man's behavior in HEAD (regarding line-length) was the result of an
outside factor. However, man being a shell script meant I could
modify, so I did the following.
Check out the
manfrom HEAD.$ svn checkout svn://svn.freebsd.org/base/head/usr.bin/manModify
man.shin the subversion checkout with the following patch.--- man.sh.orig 2011-01-19 22:41:34.000000000 -0600 +++ man.sh 2011-01-19 22:41:33.000000000 -0600 @@ -891,9 +891,10 @@ search_whatis whatis "$@" } +cols=`stty -a | grep columns | awk '{ print $6 }'` EQN=/usr/bin/eqn COL=/usr/bin/col -NROFF='/usr/bin/groff -S -Wall -mtty-char -man' +NROFF='/usr/bin/groff -S -Wall -mtty-char -man -rLL=`echo $cols - 3 | bc`n' PIC=/usr/bin/pic SYSCTL=/sbin/sysctl TBL=/usr/bin/tbl #v-Install fakeroot (needed to install the man pages).
Install the
manfrom HEAD.$ fakeroot make install BINDIR=/home/dave/usr/bin MANDIR=/home/dave/usr/share/man/man NO_MANCOMPRESS="YES"- Note: The Makefile doesn't honor PREFIX, but does honor BINDIR/MANDIR.
Finally, my man pages are displayed in full-col-o-vision!
So, more gymnastics than I would like, but functional. I'll use this method until the new shell script version in HEAD makes it into the base of a release I'm running.
Thanks to all on the mailing list for the information and inspiration!