Bug 79172

Summary: man pages no longer sized to fit terminal ...
Product: [Retired] Red Hat Linux Reporter: Bill Crawford <billc>
Component: manAssignee: Eido Inoue <havill>
Status: CLOSED CURRENTRELEASE QA Contact: Ben Levenson <benl>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 8.0CC: code, david
Target Milestone: ---   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: i386   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
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Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2003-07-29 15:27:56 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
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Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
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Description Bill Crawford 2002-12-06 18:29:33 UTC
Description of Problem:
In previous versions, the man page would be displayed with an appropriate number
of columns to suit the size of the terminal (I'm using an xterm set at 96x32
using X resources, but the same thing happens if I resize manually).


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
[bill@fraser man]$ rpm -q man groff
man-1.5j-11
groff-1.18-6

How Reproducible:
View any man page in a xterm at other than 80 columns :)

Expected Results:
For the man page to be displayed at an appropriate width for the xterm.

Additional Information:
It appears that the command issued by man is trying to set the width as in
previous versions, but with the current version of groff it isn't working.  I
think this may be due to changes in an-old.tmac, but not absolutely sure. 
However altering the command to issue ".nr LL 96n" instead of ".ll 8.6i" works
fine ...

Result of "ps auxww" (trimmed):

bill      1139  0.0  0.2  3400  748 pts/6    S    18:27   0:00 man cvs
bill      1142  0.0  0.3  3808  956 pts/6    S    18:27   0:00 sh -c (cd
/usr/share/man && (echo ".ll 8.6i"; echo ".pl 1100i"; /bin/gunzip -c
'/usr/share/man/man1/cvs.1.gz'; echo; echo ".pl \n(nlu+10") | /usr/bin/gtbl |
/usr/bin/nroff -c -mandoc | less -is)
bill      1143  0.0  0.3  3812 1008 pts/6    S    18:27   0:00 sh -c (cd
/usr/share/man && (echo ".ll 8.6i"; echo ".pl 1100i"; /bin/gunzip -c
'/usr/share/man/man1/cvs.1.gz'; echo; echo ".pl \n(nlu+10") | /usr/bin/gtbl |
/usr/bin/nroff -c -mandoc | less -is)
bill      1146  0.0  0.4  3824 1076 pts/6    S    18:27   0:00 /bin/sh
/usr/bin/nroff -c -mandoc
bill      1147  0.0  0.2  1704  612 pts/6    S    18:27   0:00 less -is
bill      1151  0.0  0.3  4084  988 pts/6    S    18:27   0:00 groff -mtty-char
-Tutf8 -P-c -mandoc
bill      1153  1.7  0.7  4900 1800 pts/6    S    18:27   0:00 grotty -c

If I rerun the same commands but change the echo command to ".nr LL 96n" it
works sort of OK (but the lines actually still wrap :() ,.... and amusingly if I
run man in a 80-column xterm I am finding lines wrapping occasionally(!) so
something is broken anyway ...

Comment 1 Derek Martin 2002-12-18 07:23:08 UTC
Yeah, I'm seeing the same broken behavior...

Comment 2 Eido Inoue 2003-02-07 20:17:32 UTC
*** Bug 80893 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 3 Florian La Roche 2003-02-08 01:15:48 UTC
The debian changelog also documents that setting the line length
changed for groff-1.18 and that newer man_db releases do this correctly now.
Look in man_db 2.4.1 for "-rLL=" and "-rLT=" settings for newer groff
releases.

greetings,

Florian La Roche