Default Solaris Man Pager

The title of this should actually say "Default Solaris man Pager Sucks" but in the interest of professionalism, I left that last word out.

The Solaris default pager for man pages is "more". It unfortunately doesn’t support the friendly controls of "less", search highlighting, scrolling one line at a time, etc. This is less functional than using "less" for your pager. With that, let’s have a look at how we fix this.

If you would like to change it,  you need to crack open your .bashrc and add the following line…​

export PAGER="less"

Tada!

Launch bash and look up a man page.

As a friend of mine said in regards to this, "LESS is more than MORE."

One closing notes. This seems to be a very universal variable, so this should also work with csh, ksh, sh, etc, though the rc file that needs to be edited will be different.

Category:Solaris Category:man