man command question

[g]

On 03/07/14 14:41, Joachim Backes wrote:
> On 03/06/2014 09:38 PM, Cameron Simpson wrote:
>> On 06Mar2014 16:19, lee <lee at yun.yagibdah.de> wrote:
>>> Joachim Backes <joachim.backes at rhrk.uni-kl.de> writes:
>>>> I'm running F20 on gnome3 desktop,
>>>> and I see some weird effect in the man command (entered in a gnome
>>>> terminal) if using the "-P" command option:
>>>>
>>>> man -P cat man >/dev/null
>>>>
>>>> should use the cat command as pager. I get the expected effect, but one
>>>> or more additional messages to stderr:
>>>>
>>>> <standard input>:981: warning [p 7, 5.8i, div `3tbd1,0', 0.0i]: cannot
>>>> adjust line
>>>> <standard input>:990: warning [p 7, 5.8i, div `3tbd4,0', 0.0i]: cannot
>>>> adjust line
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Anybody knows what this means? No such message if the gnome terminal is
>>>> wide enough.
>>>
>>> It probably means what it says.  You can format man pages with a
>>> variable number of characters per line, hence you might have "(setq
>>> Man-width 75)" in your ~/.emacs to get a reasonably formatted display
>>> rather than one with the lines being too long for comfortable reading.
>>>
>>> Now say, you specify zero characters per line, and the software may
>>> suddenly have a hard time adjusting the lines.
>>
>> In case lee's unclear: the output of "man" isn't going to your terminal any
>> more, so it doesn't know how wide the output should be.
>
> Hi Cameron,
>
> Sounds reasonable.
>
>>
>> Personally I would expect it to default to assuming an 80-column output and
>> format for that. But it appears not.
>
> I filed a BZ.

being that no one asked, i will.

why would someone send a man page to a null device?

to a printer, file, another terminal, yes. /dev/null, never.

because intent of 'man' is not to send output to /dev/null,
why should it written to do so?

such is not intent of 'man', therefore, i would not consider
doing such as a bug. other than person doing so. ;-)


-- 

peace out.

in a world with out fences, who needs gates.

tc.hago.

g
.