Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!ogicse!schaefer
From: schaefer@ogicse.ogi.edu (Barton E. Schaefer)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.mush
Subject: Re: MUSH and use of more
Keywords: MUSH, MORE
Message-ID: <8512@ogicse.ogi.edu>
Date: 7 Apr 90 18:15:04 GMT
References: <1127@gmuvax2.gmu.edu>
Organization: Oregon Graduate Institute (formerly OGC), Beaverton, OR
Lines: 31

In article <1127@gmuvax2.gmu.edu> szoltek@gmuvax2.gmu.edu (S.M. Zoltek) writes:
} 
} I am having trouble getting more to behave properly when reading
} mail.  Specifically, after reading two screens of a note that is
} several screens long and then pressing the "b" key I just get a beep.
} I believe that I should instead get "paged" one page back.  This is
} what happens when I use more on a file when I am not reading mail.  

The `problem' here is that "more" is reading from a pipe, not from a
file.  Mush runs the pager via popen(3) and writes the message to the
pager's standard input; "more" does not actually buffer the text, it
"pages backward" by performing an fseek(3) on the paged file and then
re-reading it.  Because fseek() doesn't work on pipes, you get a beep.
You will see the same behavior if you use "cat file | more".

Two possible solutions:

1.  Get and/or start using "less" instead of "more".

2.  set pager = 'cat > temp_file_name; more temp_file_name'

The latter is not guaranteed to behave well for other uses of the pager,
and in fact acts a little oddly on my system for no reason I can discern
(it starts out by printing "--More-- Next file: temp_file_name" as if
there were some other [empty] input file; this is probably because stdin
does not appear to "more" to be a terminal).
-- 
Bart Schaefer          "EARTH: Surrender IMMEDIATELY or we PICKLE DAN QUAYLE"

                                                                    "THPPFT!"
schaefer@cse.ogi.edu (used to be cse.ogc.edu)