How do I pipe a man page into emacs for searches?

[OS_Stuntman]

Hello,

How do I pipe a man page into emacs for searching, or how do I make grep mimic an html anchor?

[Oko]

Originally Posted by OS_Stuntman

Hello,

How do I pipe a man page into emacs for searching, or how do I make grep mimic an html anchor?

Why would you pipe man pages into an editor if you just need to search? You can do something like this to search through the man pages of let say cat command.

man cat|less

[jb_daefo]

Originally Posted by OS_Stuntman

Hello,

How do I pipe a man page into emacs for searching, or how do I make grep mimic an html anchor?

I'm not familiar with either of those two methodologies, but I set PAGER to

/usr/ports/sysutils/lookat

because of its "s key" dialogs as well as other keybindings seem to work better from this perspective at least. Edit: forgot to explain HOW to set pager: in one's shell rc file this may work (not a usually seen construct...)

 alias man='env PAGER=lookat man $1'

[Carpetsmoker]

To expand on the previous answers:

From man(1)

     -P pager
             Use specified pager.  Defaults to “less -sR” if color support is
             enabled, or “more -s”.  Overrides the MANPAGER environment vari‐
             able, which in turn overrides the PAGER environment variable.

Using % man cat | less is exactly the same as just using % man cat.

As for searching, you can either use the / key in less, or use % man ls | egrep pattern

Both methods support regular expressions are are basically the same, the (e)grep method is more suited for commandline/scripted use, while the interactive search in less is for interactive use.

[Oko]

Originally Posted by Carpetsmoker

To expand on the previous answers:

From man(1)

     -P pager
             Use specified pager.  Defaults to “less -sR” if color support is
             enabled, or “more -s”.  Overrides the MANPAGER environment vari‐
             able, which in turn overrides the PAGER environment variable.

Using % man cat | less is exactly the same as just using % man less.

I must be missing something here. Could you please explain above. On my (arguably OpenBSD desktop)

% man cat | less

piples man pages for command cat into less thereby allowing regular expression search vi style.
% man less
Just gives me man pages for command less.

You seem to claim that those two are the same. Could you please explain?

[jb_daefo]

[FWIW I edited my post above to explain precisely how, it was less than useful originally as written.] Sorry for the oversight.

[Carpetsmoker]

Originally Posted by Oko

I must be missing something here. Could you please explain above. On my (arguably OpenBSD desktop)

% man cat | less

piples man pages for command cat into less thereby allowing regular expression search vi style.
% man less
Just gives me man pages for command less.

You seem to claim that those two are the same. Could you please explain?

I'm sorry, I said it wrong. I corrected the original post. What I meant was:

Using % man cat | less is exactly the same as just using % man cat.

[Oko]

Originally Posted by Carpetsmoker

I'm sorry, I said it wrong. I corrected the original post. What I meant was:

Using % man cat | less is exactly the same as just using % man cat.

Pager does indeed works on OpenBSD. But search / doesn't work properly
(it seems that I can input search word but it doesn't get highlighted) With
% man cat|less it does get highlighted. I just checked this on Devio server as I am typing this message from a Windows machine. Actually OpenBSD man command doesn't have switch -P but the pager is on by default.

Maybe I am missing something about highlighting in OpenBSD.

[TerryP]

My word you're all useless lol (no offense), I'm a VIM user and I know this.


If you want to read a manual page in emacs, use M-x man and it will prompt you for the name of the man page. It will then open a window with the manual page all nicely formatted for you. If you use emacs a lot, avoid leaving it for crap like manual pages.


If you really want to pipe it *into* emacs without running it through emacs, you will need an external program to simulate the effect of `man ls > tmp-file && emacs tmp-file && rm tmp-file`, because emacs is not really a UNIX program and like the original vi, not entirely friendly to being piped a file on stdin. You can find solutions on emacs wiki or Google.


less generally presents a vi style interface for navigation, or at least it responds to my muscle memory. So if someone is asking to use emacs, probably not going to want /wtf searches. Sometimes I even use vim just for a better known target. I don't know how man -P emacs works on OpenBSD but my Linux work station doesn't work with it either.

[OS_Stuntman]

Work and things kept me away, but thanks for the replies.