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cwd
Asked: 2011-01-24 12:29:10 +0800 CST

How can I keep "man" from hyphenating items? MANWIDTH?

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I've been trying to grab the output of man pages and use it in some other things. That's working OK, but linux is hyphenating the words that are at the end of a line and that's kind of irritating because when the text is reconstructed on a variable width viewing window (think HTML), the line breaks reamin split- ting up ran- dom words.

How should I do this? I saw the entry regarding MANWIDTH but I can't get it to work...

I tried:

MANWIDTH=30
man ls

-- also --

MANWIDTH=1000
man ls

No luck. I tried creating a man.conf that had MANWIDTH 30 (no "=" sign) and putting it in ~ and then tried:

man -C ~/man.conf ls

Man opens and it give me something like this:

^H1/4[{sUEy;o)||1XEQ'eo2>>vYYR%+-B
_
                                      _
AUe X...-qe>uyo{R2}Ia\fzuyv?>Oy|3+aaOGN+->ynuuLu{Ey3/4aecSYI~3[=5KVc]aem|6ME=ei2E,
>>Z-:-OT3p<<cMnUA]ColXa+-No?6 AzQakmoEyo32HaeUoEaIxfSc;@S3[&%VDaODO(C)3O}I3
$2z-II9|D5S'VIo.m-PEA9|?'YXi4eZcy}R(R)t^oyu9|d0e<N8t4a3/41A:)
oMNb"ao"OOu>EDaD&E`haUooEiw;f1C.bU-C KpAyb^92uE
o2LKAe   N}2OFSFi~MAO QA9|xT@k1/4zy$l'eAAy']CC/>>K^%T*LmI~An&qu
ot;o1/2i2(R)141L,Z o.LXniE$~R6.a5O#AEUA14UiFwY~xIpB8<<JOo(R)QoMAEnUxu$Iw&Cj3eO
fBLJ[Q^Xi-:->>(R)Eo2pm1c, _3ii<<EsCa;

So how do I get rid of those hyphenated words in the mid- dle of my man output?

linux man

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    On my Debian system, man man offers the --no-hyphenation (--nh) option. The same man page also refers to MANOPT, which allows you to set the default options for any future invocation of man. Another option possibly of interest to you is --no-justification (--nj).

    Putting this in your .profile (.bash_profile) would disable hyphenation and justification:

    export MANOPT='--nh --nj'

    However, what slightly puzzles me is why you don't use the --html flag to generate HTML directly from the man command:

    export MANOPT='--html'

    Chris

    • 4

  2. Edit /usr/share/tmac/doc.tmac and search for the line .de reset-args. Within that macro definition, you should see a line saying something like:

    .hy \n[hyphen-flags]

    Change that line to:

    .hy 0

    If you have any pre-generated cat manpages, you'll need to nuke those to force regeneration.

    You're done. But it's global.

    • 0

  3. I like 

    man zshall | fold -w 80 -s | less

    where "zshall" is the man topic

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