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Description of problem: I've been plagued by weird characters when reading man pages for some time. I knew that some weirdnesses were to be expected due to (I think) the move to UTF-8 some releases ago. But I was still seeing more than most people. Eventually realised that I had this in ~/.bash_profile: LESSCHARSET=latin1 ..because this was a workaround recommended in the BUGS section of "man man". (I had been having the problem described at the time, and that had fixed it, and then I had kept the line in my dotfiles. Since about RH 8. Oops.) For people using UTF-8-happy locales, is this actually a good recommendation these days? Or should it be amended? If so, to what? (I have no clue myself.) Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): man-1.5m2-6 less-382-3 How reproducible: every time Steps to Reproduce: 1. man ping 2. LESSCHARSET="latin1" man ping
there are some people that still try to run their systems in the "old" mode. the man page says to only put the LESSCHARSET in if you see "blinking \255 or <AD>"... so it can probably stay in there, as you won't see these on a properly configured system, thus you wouldn't put LESSCHARSET in.