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52 responses total.

Try:

  define pager "less -dE -P 'Press SPACEBAR for next screen, q to quit'"

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John just illistrated the principle of RTFM very well in response #1. :-)

Yes.  Valerie, I was surprised at you.

What happens with newuser on m-net?  I seem to remember that I got 
a helpful prompt tellimg me to hit space and when I checked the
.cfonce that was created for me it had "more -i" or something like
that.  Like the helpful prompt was built into the more program over
there.

Perhaps the same idea from #1 should be used for the shell prompt.  If
you don't know anything about unix and you pick bbs shell and you or
your line noise accidently issues a ctrl-z you'd be faced with a shell
prompt.  That prompt could say, "type fg to get back to PicoSpan."

If your shell is bbs and you issue a control-Z, I don't think you'd
get a shell prompt.  You'd probably be logged off.

Okay, I just checked it out.  If bbs is running as your login process,
it ignores or traps control-Z's and just leaves you in bbs.

Ctrl-Z DOES log off those of us who use bbs. ;)

I guess I can believe that.  In any case you wouldn't get a shell
prompt, since if bbs is your login process, there's no other shell
running underneath.

I looked at /b and I didn't see how it was different from picking sh as
your login shell and running bbs in your .profile .  What does /b do?

Anyway, here's why I suggested a new prompt.  My friend didn't know
anything about picospan or unix so I had him pick csh as his login shell
and I put kite's menu in his .login.  He picked bbs from the menu and must
have hit ctrl-z because he got a shell prompt and didn't know how to get
back.  So I guess I have a new suggestion: 

A choice in addition to the shells and bbs in newuser should be "menu" or
perhaps "lynx" after lynx learns to execute programs.  People who opt for
this choice should have a helpful shell prompt that tells them how to get
out of the shell. 

Look at /b again.  It does an *exec* of bbs -- that's different from
just "running" it.  Instead of starting up bbs as a subprocess of sh,
it "overlays" sh in the same process.

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A certain other PIco
span (oops, hit Enter while reaching fopr shift) system uses more for the
default pager but has a prompt has says to hit spacebar for more or q to
quit.  If line noise feeds it garbage it says hit h for help. 

Re 12: thanks for explaining exec.  So, with this friend with 'menu' in
his .login, would 'exec menu' protect him from unwanted shell prompts? 

I imagine so.

If menu is a script, he'd probably have to do something like exec csh menu
or exec sh menu.  Though I'm not sure, & don't have time to try it at
the moment.

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It's a sh builtin, but also a csh builtin.  Don't know about the others,
but I'd expect them to have it too.  Might conceivably be under another
name, I guess.

Should work in ksh, bash, and tcsh too, since they're all extensions of
sh or csh.

I discovered, with mixed emotions, that the "less" pager mungs ANSI
codes and backspaces.  This may or may not be a good thing.

Can you be more specific?

Control characters show up as "visible" -- e.g. if there's a backspace
character in a response, "less" displays ^H rather than moving the
cursor left.  Maybe there's an option that changes this, but I don't
have time to RTFM right now.

The -r option or perhaps -u or -U is what you are looking for I think.
Yes, I RTFM.

<davel sees why most people don't RTFM>

I only RTFM when I just *have* to find the answer either because of a need or
to satisfy curiosity.

My point was that you're supposed to RTFM to find out what option to use.
If the answer is x, or maybe y or z, or it could be u, then what good is
the manual?  (And this does happen too often to me, too.)

And now we know why they call it the "FM"...

Re #28 The 'FM' made it quite clear which it was, I was just in too much of a
hurry to decide which one of them solved the problem.  i.e. I didn't do a
closeup read just a quick glance read

I looked at the FM.  Yes, it's -r or -u or -U or some combination
thereof, but I think I'll have to experiment to determine the exact
effect of each.  I read with interest the fact that "less" makes an
effort to be compatible with "more" in the way it interprets backspaces
in certain contexts to do underscoring and highlighting on terminals
that have the capability.  More later.

See, the thing is, the "more" and "less" pagers let you use
control-h's to obtain u^H_n^H_d^H_e^H_r^H_s^H_c^H_o^H_r^H_e^H_ and
h^Hhi^Hig^Hgh^Hhl^Hli^Hig^Hgh^Hht effects.

cool!  that underscore und highlight is neato!

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And mine shows "underscore" highlighted, and "highlight" no different
from the surrounding text.  One more reason not to bother.

actually i got underline underlined and underline highlighted.

After some further RingTFM and testing, I've determined that to
get ansi antics + underscoring + boldfacing, the pager should be.

      less -drE -P 'Press SPACEBAR for next screen, q to quit'

So perhaps we could have two standard pagers:

    noansi:
      less -dE -P 'Press SPACE etc etc'

    ansi:
      less -drE -P 'Press SPACE etc etc'

with noansi being the default but 'define pager ansi' being
available also.

Re #32. When it first appears I get underline underlined and nothing
special on highlight. I use pager more and when I scroll to the next
screen, and then scroll back in the buffer, the underlining of underline
has disappeared! 

My pager is "less -c -E" and I've reverted to my 1986 Procomm 2.4.2
terminal program.  I got highlights on both special words.  Are you 
sure your terminal is dumber than mine, popcorn?  Perhaps it's your pager.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss