man pages

[Orbity]

At my work we use RedHat 8 and I get some odd characters showing up in the man pages when I look up anything.

For instance, here is an example of the man pages I get for grep:
...
OPTIONS
âA NUM, ââafterâcontext=NUM
Print NUM lines of trailing context after matching lines.
Places a line containing ââ between contiguous groups of
matches.
...
Does anyone know why this happens or how to fix it?

I'm using a program called putty to connect to the linux box with ssh, but since this happens with other programs used to connect to it as well I don't think it is the connection software.

Thanks,
Orb

[mdwatts]

What language settings did you select when you first installed? That could be the problem.

Post the results of

echo $MANOPT

echo $LC_MESSAGES

echo $LANG

and also have a look through the manpage for man (man man) for the 'locale' explaination.

[Orbity]

I didn't do the installation, I don't maintain the server. Actually the person who does maintain it is clueless as well since he is a DBA not a sys admin.

Anyway, here is the results of those commands:
$ echo $MANOPT

$ echo $LC_MESSAGES

$ echo $LANG
en_US.UTF-8
The first two came up blank.

I didn't see anything in the man pages for man about 'locale', perhaps I'm just blind.

[mdwatts]

Originally posted by Orbity

I didn't see anything in the man pages for man about 'locale', perhaps I'm just blind.

The first mention of 'locale' is at the top in the SYNOPSIS section.

Can you try the manpages locally just to rule out the connection software?

[Orbity]

Here is what I have in my synopsis section as well as the sections before an after so you can see I'm showing the whole thing:
NAME
man â format and display the onâline manual pages
manpath â determine userâs search path for man pages

SYNOPSIS
man [âacdfFhkKtwW] [ââpath] [âm system] [âp string] [âC config_file]
[âM pathlist] [âP pager] [âS section_list] [section] name ...

DESCRIPTION
man formats and displays the onâline manual pages. If you specify secâ
tion, man only looks in that section of the manual. name is normally
the name of the manual page, which is typically the name of a command,
function, or file. However, if name contains a slash (/) then man
interprets it as a file specification, so that you can do man ./foo.5
or even man /cd/foo/bar.1.gz.

See below for a description of where man looks for the manual page
files.
I don't think I can get local access to the machine, but will look into it just to be sure it is not the connection software.

Thanks,
Orb

[mdwatts]

A online copy of the man manpage.

http://linux.math.tifr.res.in/manuals/man/man.html

From mine


SYNOPSIS
man [-c|-w|-tZHT device] [-adhu7V] [-i|-I] [-m system[,...]] [-L locale] [-p string] [-M path] [-P pager]
[-r prompt] [-S list] [-e extension] [[section] page ...] ...
man -l [-7] [-tZHT device] [-p string] [-P pager] [-r prompt] file ...
man -k [apropos options] regexp ...
man -f [whatis options] page ...


I would really suggest you try to get locate access to verify this problem still exists instead of us having you change language & locale settings which further causes additional problems.

[knute]

Looks to me like the character set being used doesn't contain all of the characters necessary to display everything properly.

I know that there's a way to set up the default font used on the console, but I can't remember exactly where that would be off the top of my head.

I know that slackware has the fontconfig app to be able to change that.

I'm thinking in /etc/console maybe would be a good place to start, but since you don't have those privledges, it would fall to Mr. Clueless to do it. :)

HTH