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Shouldn't 'man' depend on 'col'? Shouldn't 'col' be easier to find?
- From: Jack Duthen <jduthen dot 01 at gmail dot com>
- To: cygwin <cygwin at cygwin dot com>
- Date: Tue, 8 Jul 2014 17:47:09 +0200
- Subject: Shouldn't 'man' depend on 'col'? Shouldn't 'col' be easier to find?
- Authentication-results: sourceware.org; auth=none
Problem #1:
----------
After I loaded a few cygwin packages, I got this:
$ man bash | wc
man: can't execute col: No such file or directory
The "man" command works perfectly when the stdout is NOT redirected,
but, when sent to a pipe or a file, the command "man" fails with the
above message.
Question #1:
Shouldn't the 'man' function/package depend on the 'col' function/package?
Problem #2
----------
To solve my 'man' problem,I tried to find the 'col' command.
I launched the standard interface (setup.exe) and entered 'col' in the
'Search' text field.
It gave me a list of packages, mainly related to 'colamd', 'colorgc',
'protocol' stuff, 'colored' stuff, 'texlive-collection' stuff,
'colordiff'...
but no clear link to the missing 'col.exe'.
I tried to put 'col[^A-Za-z]' in the 'Search' text field but it gave nothing.
Question #2:
Shouldn't the 'col.exe' function/package be referenced in some (clear) package?
Problem #3
----------
I googled it and found:
"Cannot locate col command in any current packages" at
https://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2002-04/msg00414.html
whose answer was (in 2002):
"Use this link to find out: http://www.cygwin.com/packages/"
So I went there, tried to search for 'col', found more than 1000
answers... useless...
Then I searched for '[^A-Za-z]col[^A-Za-z]' and found 17 matches for
[^A-Za-z0-9_]col[^A-Za-z0-9_], mainly emacs stuff, glpk stuff,
singular-base stuff, texlive-collection stuff and...
the winner is: 'util-linux-2.21-1 - Random collection of Linux
utilities' which contains '/usr/bin/col.exe' among 178 lines.
Question #3
To get a 'man' that works when piped, is there a better way than
loading this "random" collection of utilities?
Am I the only one to get that problem???
)jack(
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