UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi
I tried to open the man page of sh and piped to `pg`. Normally while reading a file page by page using `pg`, if we wanna quit at the middle of file, we give "q" near the colon mode.

Ex1: $cat file1 | pg
hi
how
r
u
: (page1) now press "return key", it will go to next page
yes
i
am
fine
: q (I wanna quit here and I gave q and its quit from the process normally)
$


The above mentioned condition is normal

My case is:

$ man sh | pg
User Commands sh(1)



NAME
sh, jsh - standard and job control shell and command inter-
preter

SYNOPSIS
/usr/bin/sh [-acefhiknprstuvx] [argument...]

--------- goes on

: q (now if i give q here, its showing error "BROKEN PIPE")

why in normal case mentioned in example 1 its not happening, while in man sh|pg its happening (broken pipe)?

Please help me on this with clear explanation?

Are your man pages preformatted i.e. are your cat subdirectories populated? If not, the man utility often uses pipes to create the output you see from the nroff or sgml sources.

Hi fpmurphy/all,
how to check whether my man pages are preformatted or how can I check my cat subdirectories populated?

For your info, its not my man page automatically piping it with pg. I have done it done as I shown in my First post. Plz go thro tat once again..

Thanks..

I don't see anything to worry about.

Broken pipe is the message you get from EPIPE which is the error you get if a write is attempted on a pipe where the read end is closed.

As your pager is the read end and is quitting, it's closing the read end of the pipe. Hence the program writing to the pipe, man in this case, is going get an error when it tries to write to the pipe.

So the error message is coming from man, not pg.