Manpages are the last line of defence when it comes to unix troubleshooting. After you’ve tried everything you could have think of and it still doesn’t work you know it’s time to read the manual.
By default linuxes use the less command to display the man page requested by the user. The manpage is displayed as plain text and because of that it can be sometimes hard to find what you’re looking for. Keywords and special parameters are printed with a bold face to ease document navigation but sometimes this is not enough.
Navigation is done by using the up and down arrows , page up/ page down and the space key.
Searching through the document is done by typing the / character followed by the word or phrase to search for.
One useful hack is to color the manpage so that keywords parameters and so on are highlighted.
To do this you we have to set some environment variables:
export LESS_TERMCAP_mb=$'\E[01;31m' # begin blinking
export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\E[01;31m' # begin bold
export LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\E[0m' # end mode
export LESS_TERMCAP_se=$'\E[0m' # end standout-mode
export LESS_TERMCAP_so=$'\E[01;44;33m' # begin standout-mode - info box
export LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\E[0m' # end underline
export LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\E[01;32m' # begin underline
The strange ‘\E0 strings stand for color codes used by the bash shell. You can check out some info about that on the bash-prompt-howto
After you have customized your colors you can save the above commands in your .bashrc file (the one in your home folder) so that the variables are set every time you logon.
