man(1) oddity - was: HEADS UP: bzip2(1) compression for manpages...

[Andy Farkas]

On Mon, 19 May 2003, Ruslan Ermilov wrote:
> On Mon, May 19, 2003 at 09:26:26PM +1000, Andy Farkas wrote:
> >
> > Here is a table of what I *really* see:
> >
> > FreeBSD-4.8:
> >             | no catpage     | catpage
> > Normal user | fmt msg, waits | no msg, no wait
> > Super user  | fmt msg, waits | no msg, no wait
> >
> > FreeBSD-5.1-B:
> >
> > Normal user | no msg, waits  | no msg, no wait
> > Super user  | fmt msg, waits | no msg, no wait
> >
> >
> > The difference is Normal user.
> >
> This example is wrong.  With your example you're timing the
> formatting of the whole manpage, and I'm telling you that
> normal man(1) invocation (with PAGER) will start showing you
> something on your terminal much sooner.

No, thats what I *really* *see* without redirection or anything. Plain old
`man ppp` command.  I only used the `> /dev/null` example because the same
thing is experienced by the user.

Please boot up 5.1-B on a slow box and type 'man ppp'. You'll see what I
mean then.

--

 :{ andyf at speednet.com.au

        Andy Farkas
    System Administrator
   Speednet Communications
 http://www.speednet.com.au/