Note: This bug is displayed in read-only format because the product is no longer active in Red Hat Bugzilla.

Bug 6500

Summary:	How to fix the blinking ADs displayed instead of hyphens..?
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	Telsa Gwynne <hobbit>
Component:	man	Assignee:	Cristian Gafton <gafton>
Status:	CLOSED RAWHIDE	QA Contact:
Severity:	low	Docs Contact:
Priority:	low
Version:	6.1	CC:	cks-rhbugzilla, hjstein
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i386
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2000-02-15 22:11:44 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Telsa Gwynne 1999-10-29 14:54:45 UTC

Very trivial, but...

I have long been plagued by glowing ADs in angle brackets
when reading man pages. Quite by chance, I found this in
'man man' as a bug, with a suggested fix of setting the
LESSCHARSET variable to 'latin1'

'man less' makes it look a bit more complicated, but this
certainly works for me. Is it possible to put this in the
/etc/profile? Or, if this would cause trouble for people
using other languages and character sets (I don't understand
all the references to locale but I gather that that's what
it's all about), is there some other way to deal with this?

Comment 1 andrewem 1999-12-10 03:42:59 UTC

The problem is indeed the "less" package not groking latin1 by default.  Putting
export LESSCHARSET=latin1 in /etc/profile is a good solution.

Another solution is to configure the man package to NOT use latin1, by editing
/etc/man.config and changing the lines with -Tlatin1 to -Tascii.  Likely won't
get some of the pretty latin1 characters displayed though.

I recommend fixing the "less" package default, or changing /etc/profile.

Comment 2 Preston Brown 1999-12-22 14:48:59 UTC

the real fix is to set your locale if you don't want to use POSIX/C/ASCII.  If I
do LANG=en_US man man, the dashes get removed.

Comment 3 Harvey Stein 1999-12-23 03:03:59 UTC

This isn't just man & less agreeing on character sets, it's everything
on the system.  For example, M-x man in emacs.  So, setting
LESSCHARSET isn't a complete solution.

The LANG=en_US fix is more global, but a) why should /etc/man.config
be arbitrarily deciding to use -Tlatin1 instead of -Tascii (as it was
in the version in RH5.2), b) does setting LANG get *all* text handling
programs to agree, and c) can you elaborate more on the effects of
setting LANG=en_US?  Your comment about setting it "if you don't want
to use POSIX/C/ASCII" makes me a little nervous.

Also, is this going to be corrected in RH6.2, and if so, is it going
to be via setting LANG by default in /etc/profile?

Comment 4 Bill Nottingham 2000-02-05 20:01:59 UTC

*** Bug 8574 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 5 Cristian Gafton 2000-02-15 22:11:59 UTC

echo LANG=en_US > /etc/sysconfig/i18n

That _is_ the proper fix.

And yes, it will be fixed in the next release

Comment 6 Tony Krch 2000-03-16 00:01:59 UTC

*** Bug 10185 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***