Man – How to Use Man Without Less

lessman

By default, man uses less to output text. How can I tell it to just output to stdout? My terminal emulator has a scroll bar and search function and I want to use those instead of the arrow keys.

Best Answer

Actually it uses whatever is specified in the MANPAGER or the PAGER environment variable.

Depending on your man implementation and version there could be also a command line switch to specify the pager.

With the man-db implementation I use all the below ways work:

MANPAGER=cat man man

PAGER=cat man man

MANOPT='-P cat' man man

man -P cat man

To set it permanently, just add it to your ~/.bashrc (or other initialization file used by your shell):

export MANPAGER=cat

That works with some older man implementations too, while MANOPT is man-db specific:

export MANOPT='-P cat'

(Better do not set PAGER that way. That one is used by many other applications too.)

There could be also a global configuration file. man-db has /etc/man_db.conf or /etc/manpath.config. There you can set:

DEFINE    pager    cat

But unfortunately that is taken in consideration only if neither MANPAGER nor PAGER is set.

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