[wellylug] Man-page formatting

[Grant McLean]

On Thu, 2005-06-30 at 21:29 +1200, Nick Jensen wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Whenever I use "man" to read a manual, the man page is formatted about
> 5 characters too narrow, so every line has a line break and 5
> characters on the next line. This makes it really hard to read.
> 
> If I am using a terminal program like xterm or Eterm I can widen the
> terminal after the man page has been displayed and it will come right,
> but if I then open another one it will again be formatted wrong.

The man command is probably formatting things based on the value in the
$COLUMNS environment variable.

When you're running bash and you resize the window, bash gets a signal
and updates $COLUMNS, but ...

If you're in another program in the text window such as man/less/vi, the
foreground program gets the window change signal and bash doesn't, so
when you get back to the shell, the value of $COLUMNS won't match the
window size.

Cheers
Grant