Originally posted by osxrules:
Is there a way to get man pages in the terminal so that you can scroll up and down them when you load them in and also search them?
In Jaguar, I used to load the man page into the terminal and when I reached the end of hitting the space bar (about 100 times on big pages), I was able to search the document. Now the man pages seem to load into a small constrained area and when you reach the end, it disappears and takes you to the prompt.
This depends on what your PAGER environment variable is set to for man. By default it should be 'less -Rse'. See 'man man' for more details.
On my Panther systems 'man progname' gives me the page and it is piped through 'less -Rse' (the 'e' option is what kicks you out if you hit the spacebar on the last page). When I am in the manpage I can scroll forward a screenfull at a time witht he spacebar or 'n', I can scroll to the beginning of the page with 'g', the end of the page with 'G', back one screenfull with 'b'. Also my PageUp and PageDown keys work as expected as do the arrow keys.
Another problem I have is with the top command. For the same reason as above, it seems that it is constrained and I can't see all the running apps. Key presses just update the display.
Well, quite naturally, since 'top' is a page that in normal use updates all the time it is constrained by the dimensions of your terminal. If your terminal can handle 50 rows of text and you have 99 processes running you are just not going to see the bottom 40 or so processes displayed. That is what the 'ps' command is for. See the manpage for 'top' and I think you will find there is an option to just dump the raw output and then you can pipe it through less. This will not update though... you will only get a snapshot.
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