Broken MAN pages??? Control Characters?

Message

PopeJohnPaulII · Post by **PopeJohnPaulII** » Mon Mar 03, 2008 3:24 am

I'm not sure if the problem is with my terminals or with my man pages, but whenever I do man [some-command] the man pages appear with control characters (i.e. ESC[1m ). They appear this way in both terminal (xfce terminal) and xterm, however they display nicely in Eterm. Anyone know how to fix this problem, it makes checking man pages a real pain.

If you need any more information just let me know.

didl · Post by **didl** » Mon Mar 03, 2008 11:04 am

I had the same problem using rxvt-unicode on one of my machines
and the reason seems to be that the "-c" flag was removed
from /etc/man.conf in the latest man ebuild.
You can fix this by changing

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NROFF          /usr/bin/nroff -mandoc

to

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NROFF          /usr/bin/nroff -mandoc -c

either in /etc/man.conf or in a local ~/.man.conf
that can then be source via

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alias man='man -C ~/.man.conf'

PopeJohnPaulII · Post by **PopeJohnPaulII** » Tue Mar 04, 2008 2:36 am

Nice, that sort of worked, some of the man pages got fixed.
Man pages for stuff like bash, zsh, ypserv, ls, ps, zip, zgrep; these all seem to be working.
However a few man pages still show up weird, for example; man, znew, cmatrix, pinger, basename

Below is my man.conf, not sure what to do, but it is an improvement so far

/etc/man.conf

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...
# Useful paths - note that COL should not be defined when
# NROFF is defined as "groff -Tascii" or "groff -Tlatin1";
# not only is it superfluous, but it actually damages the output.
# For use with utf-8, NROFF should be "nroff -mandoc" without -T option.
# (Maybe - but today I need -Tlatin1 to prevent double conversion to utf8.)
#
# If you have a new troff (version 1.18.1?) and its colored output
# causes problems, add the -c option to TROFF, NROFF, JNROFF.
#
TROFF           /usr/bin/groff -Tps -mandoc -c
NROFF           /usr/bin/nroff -mandoc -c
JNROFF          /usr/bin/groff -Tnippon -mandocj -c
...

didl · Post by **didl** » Fri Mar 07, 2008 1:59 pm

I am not sure what the problem could be in this case. After
adding "-c" all man pages show up fine for me, even the
ones you mentioned.

mzq · Post by **mzq** » Thu May 01, 2008 10:36 am

Hello,

I had the same problem here. The following worked for me:

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TROFF       /usr/bin/groff -Tps -mandoc -c
NROFF       /usr/bin/nroff -mandoc -c -Tlatin1
JNROFF      /usr/bin/groff -Tnippon -mandocj -c

eccerr0r · Post by **eccerr0r** » Sun May 25, 2008 7:28 pm

make sure you remove the cached versions of your man pages in /var/man/cat*/*

Also, if you changed the env variable $LESS, it seems that -R is now a "default" which will work with nroff without -c ...

pumpichank · Post by **pumpichank** » Sat Nov 08, 2008 10:40 pm

Why does "man whatever" look terrible but "info whatever" looks okay?

Thanks!

desultory · Post by **desultory** » Sun Nov 09, 2008 12:35 am

Are you referring to [topic=670013]escape[/topic] characters being displayed instead of functioning in their canonical roles?

pumpichank · Post by **pumpichank** » Sun Nov 09, 2008 12:58 pm

Yep! Note that this happens

on a remote console using Terminal.app (mac)
on a remote gnome terminal
at the machine's console

desultory · Post by **desultory** » Mon Nov 10, 2008 4:24 am

Merged the above three posts.

pumpichank · Post by **pumpichank** » Mon Nov 10, 2008 12:26 pm

Thanks, that fixed things. Note though that the man cache is now

/var/cache/man

metalus · Post by **metalus** » Wed Feb 04, 2009 2:25 pm

Recently, I added LESS=-X to my .bashrc so my terminal would not be blanked after I read a man page. Unfortunately, that screwed up man pages. It took me an hour to realize that by doing so, I had overwritten the value set in /etc/profile.env for LESS. After I restored that value for LESS, man pages became readable again.

pumpichank · Post by **pumpichank** » Wed Feb 04, 2009 2:48 pm

metalus wrote:Recently, I added LESS=-X to my .bashrc so my terminal would not be blanked after I read a man page. Unfortunately, that screwed up man pages. It took me an hour to realize that by doing so, I had overwritten the value set in /etc/profile.env for LESS. After I restored that value for LESS, man pages became readable again.

Interesting. I've had LESS=-X in my bash profile for a bajillion years and haven't noticed a problem with it.

lyallp · Post by **lyallp** » Thu Feb 05, 2009 8:43 am

I found that if I changed /etc/man.conf

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PAGER           /usr/bin/less -is

to

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PAGER           /usr/bin/less -isR

my problems went away.

Alternatively, you could set your environment variables in a similar way.

jordanwb · Post by **jordanwb** » Thu Feb 05, 2009 4:33 pm

I get the ESC characters when I run man as root, running as non root doesn't cause any problems.

lyallp · Post by **lyallp** » Sat Feb 07, 2009 4:40 am

You probably have PAGER or MANPAGER set in one of the your profiles.

revertTS · Post by **revertTS** » Tue Feb 10, 2009 3:28 am

I seem to be getting this on a very small subset of man pages, namely ssh related ones.

For those of you who have it working properly, do the ssh pages also display without a groff error?

desultory · Post by **desultory** » Tue Feb 10, 2009 4:13 am

Have you cleared out the [post=5103866]cached[/post] [post=5276337]versions[/post]?

revertTS · Post by **revertTS** » Tue Feb 10, 2009 5:48 am

desultory wrote:Have you cleared out the [post=5103866]cached[/post] [post=5276337]versions[/post]?

Yes, I have.
This might be a bit of a different problem, actually.
The specific error I get is:

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/usr/share/groff/1.20.1/tmac/doc.tmac:3375: bad character definition

The line referenced is:

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.char \- \N'45'

It only seems to affect BSD man pages (OpenSSH, leave, etc.) and my other Gentoo systems don't have the same problem.

cwr · Post by **cwr** » Tue Feb 10, 2009 4:56 pm

I found various bugs in the BSD man pages; I assumed they were caused
by changes in nroff/troff/roff or the macro packages or whatever. I just
edited them out and re-compressed the pages. But i don't know why
you would have different problems on different systems; the problems
I saw were stable.

Will

revertTS · Post by **revertTS** » Wed Feb 11, 2009 3:36 pm

Ah yes, it is on all my systems. Before I had checked on one that wasn't fully updated.

pumpichank · Post by **pumpichank** » Mon Feb 16, 2009 1:35 pm

I just emerged up to man 1.6f-r3. The $*ROFF settings of adding -c no longer work, but adding -R to less for $PAGER does work. Can we please stop changing this?!

gohmdoree · Post by **gohmdoree** » Thu Feb 26, 2009 6:53 am

Not sure when this occurred, but noticed that my man pages are filled with ESC chars :

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ESC[1mNAMEESC[0m
       ls - list directory contents

ESC[1mSYNOPSISESC[0m
       ESC[1mls ESC[22m[ESC[4mOPTIONESC[24m]... [ESC[4mFILEESC[24m]...

ESC[1mDESCRIPTIONESC[0m
       List  information  about  the FILEs (the current directory by default).
       Sort entries alphabetically if none of ESC[1m-cftuvSUX ESC[22mnor ESC[1m--sortESC[22m.

       Mandatory arguments to long options are  mandatory  for  short  options
       too.

       ESC[1m-aESC[22m, ESC[1m--allESC[0m
              do not ignore entries starting with .

       ESC[1m-AESC[22m, ESC[1m--almost-allESC[0m
              do not list implied . and ..

       ESC[1m--authorESC[0m

Do I need to regenerate my man files? Is it a result of some setting?

My use from make.conf :

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USE="-* apache2 bash-completion bzip2 caps cgi chpax cli crypt ctype dba extensions fastcgi foomaticdb gd gif hardened imagemagick jpeg lib libg++ loop-aes mysql ncurses nls nptl nptlonly openssl pax-utils pcre perl php pic pie 
png python readline ruby session sieve snmp ssl suhosin tcpd tls unicode unzip vhosts xml xsl zip zlib pam cracklib"

makism · Post by **makism** » Thu Feb 26, 2009 8:29 am

i`m having the same issue when i do:

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sudo su

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man somemanpage

jcornez · Post by **jcornez** » Thu Feb 26, 2009 10:12 am

This was just recently discussed:

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-670013.html

Broken MAN pages??? Control Characters?

Broken MAN pages??? Control Characters?

"man ls" is garbage; "info ls" works...

Man pages with ESC chars