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NathaneilCapital
Asked: 2016-06-24 15:36:40 +0800 CST

How can I keep the content I was reading from man after I quit?

  • 772

So we use man whatever to get usage and other info regarding the whatever command, when the relevant section of info is found, I'd like to quit the man command with the info left on screen. So I can type the next command with the referee above. But the man command quits the whole screen to recover the old screen similar to vim. Is there a way to achieve this?

terminal man

7 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I believe this is not so much about man itself but rather about your pager of choice (PAGER environment variable) combined with the terminal in use.

    I'm guessing your pager is probably less (typical default pager nowadays and fits with the description).

    less has an option -X that may get you a behavior along the lines of what you're looking for.

       -X or --no-init
          Disables sending the termcap initialization and deinitialization
          strings  to  the  terminal.   This is sometimes desirable if the
          deinitialization string does something unnecessary, like  clear‐
          ing the screen.

    Eg PAGER="less -X" man man could be used for testing it out, and if you find this behavior preferable you might consider setting PAGER to this value permanently.

    • 39

  2. If you are running less as your pager (which is very common), you don't need to deal with modifying your pager, just do I/O redirection:

    man <whatever you want to man> | cat -

    This will print a copy to the terminal so you can scroll up when you need it.

    • 10

  3. As not only less but also other text applications like vim exhibit the same extremely annoying feature, what I do is simply removing the ability for the terminal to support the involved commands from the terminfo database.

    These commands are smcup and rmcup, which were designed to allow switching on and of a move where the cup command (cursor position) was allowed.

    Here is a shell function I used to automatize the task, it works at least with Solaris and likely most Linux distributions :

    fixterminfo()
{
  (
    [[ ! -d /tmp/terminfo ]] && { mkdir /tmp/terminfo || return ; }
    cd /tmp/terminfo || return
    TERM=xterm infocmp > xterm.src.org
    sed -e 's/rmcup=[^,]*,//'  -e 's/smcup=[^,]*,//' xterm.src.org > xterm.src
    if diff xterm.src.org xterm.src
    then
      echo xterm terminfo already patched
      return
    fi
    TERMINFO=/tmp/terminfo tic xterm.src
    if [ -f /usr/share/lib/terminfo/x/xterm ] ; then
      XTERM=/usr/share/lib/terminfo/x/xterm
    else
      if [ -f /lib/terminfo/x/xterm ] ; then
        XTERM=/lib/terminfo/x/xterm
      else
        if [ -f /usr/share/terminfo/x/xterm ] ; then
          XTERM=/usr/share/terminfo/x/xterm
        else
          echo xterm terminfo not found ; return
        fi
      fi
    fi
    if [ ! -f ${XTERM}.org ]
    then
      sudo cp ${XTERM} ${XTERM}.org || return
    fi
    cat /tmp/terminfo/x/xterm | sudo dd of=${XTERM}
  )
}

    If your terminal entry doesn't fallback to xterm, you should replace xterm by the right terminal name in the script.

    • 4

  4. You can pipe the output to the cat command 

    man man|cat

    or use it instead of the default pager, as in this example which invoke man on itself:

    PAGER=cat man man
    • 2

  5. Without modifying the pager, a solution with pipes that can work in most of the environments:

    Examples for man ls

    • Leave the entire man page in the screen man ls | cat
    • Read a paginated man output, with the possibility of leaving it any time with q: man ls | more
    • filter man contents with a pattern and keep matching lines in the screen: man ls | grep somestring
    • 1

  6. it's 2016, just open a second terminal or tab or window or read the man online ..

    • -4

  7. Even on my servers (FreeBSD) I install X and xfce. Then I allocate a big buffer (e.g. 10 000 lines) for the terminal emulators so that I can fully scroll out the man page in one of them, and use a separate terminal instance to assemble the command. Works a treat.

    • -4