Re: Zsh util helpfiles does not produce output

[Thorsten Kampe <thorsten@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

* Bart Schaefer (Sat, 25 Apr 2009 10:38:01 -0700)
> 
> On Apr 25,  2:41pm, Thorsten Kampe wrote:
> }
> } 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 
> } on Linux I see:
> } 
> } NAME
> 
> OK, so what appears to be happening here is that on Linux, the "man"
> program itself has become terminfo-aware and is generating terminal-
> specific control sequences instead of simple overstriking.  "col"
> doesn't know that this is happening, so all it has done is to remove
> the ESC characters, not the "escape sequences" that man has output.
> 
> So try this:
> 
>     TERM=dumb man zshbuiltins > man.txt
> 
> That should get you back to something much more like the Cygwin output.

Unfortunately not. But I guess I found the problem. The issue relates to 
this bug: http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=221191. The last 
comment fixed the issue for me.

The grotty man page says "Use the -c switch to revert to the old 
behaviour, printing a bold character c with the sequence `c BACKSPACE 
c'  and an italic character c by the sequence `_ BACKSPACE c'. "

As I don't like modifying autogenerated config files, I changed to 
GROFF_NO_SGR= man zshbuiltins | ...
...which also works fine.

Thanks to everyone (especially Bart) who helped finding a solution,
Thorsten