[Big Mac]

I just discovered that the terminal's man command is missing some functionality I found useful. If I recall correctly, the old man command used to display the percentage revealed (of the man page) at its prompt. After some upgrade, however (not sure whether it was Jaguar or one of its revisions), the percentage stopped being displayed. At the prompt, all that is shown now is a colon; when the man page is complete it displays END. I'm running 10.2.3, and as I said before I just discovered this issue. I'm not a Unix pro, so if this is a stupid question, please remember that fact.

[Chuckit]

What you're seeing is the less pager. man used to use the more pager, but apparently it got changed in the switch to 10.2. You should be able to get the old behavior by setting PAGER environment variable or piping the output to more.

The difference, incidentally, is that with less you can move both forwards and backwards in the text, while more only lets you move forward.

[warpmoon]

Actually, you can move backwards in "more", just press:

ib

Where "i" is the number of pages you want to skip back.

[Tritium]

less is a much better pager than more, if you want to see how far down in a file you are, control-G shows how many lines and how far through you are.

[Big Mac]

I am quite impressed with the knowledgeable replies. Thank you so much.