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.
Written on: 2015-06-01 07:36:21 -0600
Last edited: 2025-03-08 00:17:09 UTC
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
by Aaron Ball