[TriLUG] less and raw man pages

[Tom Bryan]

On Sunday 13 January 2002 09:03 pm, Nalin Dahyabhai wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 12, 2002 at 08:24:28PM -0500, Rodent of Unusual Size wrote:

> You're probably getting tripped up by the script the LESSOPEN env
> variable is pointing at, which "preprocesses" things for less.  If
> you unset LESSOPEN, it should revert to the expected behavior.

That's *so* cool.  I never knew about that.  I checked out what LESSOPEN does 
on my Red Hat box, and I can inspect the contents of compressed files, 
tarballs, and RPMs by typing nothing more than less.

The problem with neat tricks like the LESSOPEN magic is that I'm afraid of 
using them so much that when I switch over to Solaris and Tru64 at work, I'll 
forget what I need to do to inspect the file.  ;-)  It's that *almost* 
portable behavior that really bugs me with *nix.  

What do all of you do?  Stick to the portable minimum, or use the nifty 
features on each flavor of *nix that you use?  How do you keep from getting 
hopelessly confused?

Thanks, 
---Tom