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Comment by sicromoft | Hacker News Reader

Note that this doesn't work on macOS, where the builtin `man` command doesn't support the `-l` option.

Ah interesting, is there any workaround for Mac? Otherwise, I may just have to fallback to stripping the man page formatting and sending it to less.

> is there any workaround for Mac?

Yeah, any regular unix will do, for example openbsd, freebsd or any linux distribution.

If I understand your need correctly: pandoc.

pandoc is not installed on macOS out-of-the-box though right? The user would have to pull via homebrew or something?

The actual `man` command does this:

    /usr/bin/tbl | /usr/bin/groff -Wall -mtty-char -Tascii -mandoc -c | /usr/bin/less -is

So you could do it "manually" that way. Not the cleanest or prettiest solution but it's much lighter weight than using something like pandoc.

EDIT: Full example:

    { /usr/bin/tbl | /usr/bin/groff -Wall -mtty-char -Tascii -mandoc -c | /usr/bin/less -is; } <<EOF
    .\" Manpage for encpass.sh.
    .\" Email contact@plyint.com to correct errors or typos.
    .TH man 8 "06 March 2020" "1.0" "encpass.sh man page"
    .SH NAME
    encpass.sh \- Use encrypted passwords in shell scripts
    ...
    EOF

Thanks, this worked well on Mac.

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