Open man-page with less

Question

Possible Duplicate:
How to let man utility to use less to display manual rather than more?

How can i open up the Man-page for a command with the less-editor?

Alternatively, how can i find the man-page on the harddrive

I've tried using the manpath command but that doesn't seem to exist on solaris. Maybe there is a command to search for the manpage somehow?

Answer 1

The man command uses less by default. See man man (hehe). If yours doesn't, you could simply use a pipe like this.

man myCommand | less

Answer 2

Just add export PAGER=less in your .profile or .bashrc or whatever initialization file your shell use.

MANPATH is the variable used by man to find out manual pages.

Answer 3

In short

This should give you the path to the man page file:

man -d $ANY_MANPAGE 2>&1 >/dev/null|grep '^found ultimate'

Explanation

From the man page:

   -d, --debug
          Print debugging information.

So,

man -d $ANY_MANPAGE 2>&1 >/dev/null

gives you a lot of information (the remainder of the command suppresses the actual man page and redirects debugging to stdout).

Example output

$ man -d man

[...]
found ultimate source file /usr/share/man/man1/man.1.gz