How does man know?

[Wm E Davidsen Jr]

  man works in a way which is convenient most of the time. I would
rather type

	man | cat >/dev/tty309

  on the very rare occasion when I might send output to an unspooled
device, but I surely don't want to type

	man | more

three or four times a day to get paged output. I don't want to have to
fool with an alias or shell scipt or macro or program or anything else
which people suggest as a way to get around it.

  One of the things I've learned over the years about human interface
design is to "let the computer count the beans." In the case of man it
makes good human engineering sense the way it works now. Maybe if a few
more things worked that way people wouldn't have the false idea that
UNIX is unfriendly.

  Anyone who would like to have to pipe everytime they run man must be
really upset that ls eliminated the need to pipe through sort to get a
listing of files in order.

-- 
bill davidsen	(davidsen at crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen)
"The world is filled with fools. They blindly follow their so-called
'reason' in the face of the church and common sense. Any fool can see
that the world is flat!" - anon