Re: Zsh util helpfiles does not produce output

[Thorsten Kampe <thorsten@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

* Bart Schaefer (Fri, 24 Apr 2009 14:57:58 -0700)
> On Apr 24, 12:47pm, Thorsten Kampe wrote:
> } 
> } on a Gentoo Linux with Perl 5.8.8 and Zsh 4.3.9. The commands don't 
> } error but I receive no output at all.
> } 
> } On a Cygwin system with Perl 5.10 the help files are generated just 
> } fine.
> } 
> } Any way to debug that?
> 
> Start by capturing the output of "man zshbuiltins" on both machines
> and compare.
> 
> Then capture "man zshbuiltins | colcrt -" or equivalent and compare.

Okay, I've done the following on both machines:
man zshbuiltins > man.txt
man zshbuiltins | col -bx > col.txt

col.txt on the Cygwin host (where it works) is plain text while on the 
Linux machine it looks like this:

1mNAME0m
       zshbuiltins - zsh built-in commands

1mSHELL BUILTIN COMMANDS0m
       1m- 4m22msimple24m 4mcommand0m
              See the section `Precommand Modifiers'.

The pure man output on both machines contains control sequences - but 
they look differently: on the Cygwin machine I see 

NNAAMMEE (where the control characters look like a white spot on 
black background)

on Linux I see:

NAME

Again in Hex:
4E 08 4E 41 08 41 4D 08 4D 45 08 45 (Cygwin)
1B 5B 31 6D 4E 41 4D 45 1B 5B 30 6D (Linux)

(which both translates to a red "NAME" in the man page)

> If you don't find an explanation by that point, there's a problem with
> the perl script.
> 
> One possibility is that "man" on Gentoo is producing UTF-8 output,
> which the perl script probably can't deal with.  Try forcing another
> locale.

Tried LC_ALL, LANG and LANGUAGE to C or en_US: no difference. The zsh 
man page is plain English so the UTF8 is here the same as ASCII.

Thorsten