Red Hat man pages and escape sequences

Bill Mullen moon at lunarhub.com
Sun Feb 19 21:31:18 EST 2006


On Sun, 19 Feb 2006 19:45:19 -0500, Ben Scott wrote:

>   What's the fix for when Red Hat derived systems (in the current
> case, my Fedora Core 4 desktop) display crap in man pages?

[Suggestion of dumping FC for $OTHERDISTRO reconsidered and omitted.]

>   This typically manifests as a highlighted printed representation of
> non-printable escape codes, and/or non-English characters, where one
> would normally expect dashes, quotes, and the like.
> 
>   This smells like a Unicode issue to me.

Likewise - and that's one funky aroma, ain't it? Gack. ;-)

>   I know I've seen the fix for this before, but I can't remember
> where, and Google just finds a lot of discussion and bitching, and in
> this case, I just want the damn thing to work.
> 
>   Tried KDE konsole, GNOME gnome-terminal, xterm -- all fail in some
> way.  Tried setting LANG=C and unsetting LANG, no change.  Tried
> cursing loudly; didn't help, but made me feel a little better.

Does setting "LANG=en_US.UTF-8" (what my Mandrake systems call it) or
"LANG=en_US.utf8" (what my Gentoo box calls it) make any difference?

I don't have any experience with FC, but I'd be interested to know which
man pages display this way, so that I can inspect them on these systems.
I don't recall having seen this sort of thing here, but it's entirely
likely that I just haven't pulled up the right man pages yet. :-/

-- 
Bill Mullen
RLU #270075



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