Man Page BSD-ism And Terminal Width

[derek thomas]

> On May 3, 2017, at 18:49, Frank Steinborn <steinex at nognu.de> wrote:
> 
> derek thomas <derekmthomas at outlook.com> wrote:
>> Not all man pages on my system fit the width of my terminal. The MANWIDTH variable as described in man(1) should be the solution, but I've discovered that many if not all man page sources in base at least don't seem to respect the  variable.  As though width was hard-coded.   Other sources do respect it, such as /usr/share/man/man1/nroff.1.gz, and notably others in ports. So I suppose there is some FreeBSD-ism going on in the source format.
>> 
>> I ruled out my processing pipeline.
>> nroff -man [sourcefile] demonstrates the same differences in files.
>> 
>> Should I dig further for a proper man-macro code fix? Or am I overlooking something?  Is this expected behaviour?
>> 
>> Thanks
> 
> Hi,
> 
> can you give an example of a manpage in base that does not respect
> MANWIDTH? I just tried a few that came into my mind and all worked with
> MANWIDTH=tty.
> 
> Best regards,
> Frank

# No MANPATH-sensitive pages:
$ for f in $(basename /bin/*); do read; MANPATH=42; man $f; done 

# ...Some here though:
for f in $(find /usr/src/contrib -name '*.[1-8]'; do printf "Try %s or CTRL-C:" $f; read; MANPATH=42; man $f; done

Thanks,

-Derek