character duplication on man pages piped to open -f

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softwater Author

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character duplication on man pages piped to open -f

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Curiously, if you pipe any man page to open -f you get a duplication of characters in certain fields. For example, try

man osadecompile | open -f

which gets something like this:

Obviously, the duplication doesn't arise if the command goes to standard output, so it must be something to do with either the way 'open' deals with the input or the text editor (in this case, TextEdit.app) deals with the open -f command.

I would like to find a way to stop this happening, but I'm at a bit of a loss for the cause let alone the solution.

Any thoughts?

OS X Mountain Lion (10.8.2)

Posted on Mar 24, 2013 10:06 PM

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Answer 1

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Mark Jalbert

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Mar 25, 2013 2:28 AM in response to softwater

[ZSH-5.0.2] ~ % man osadecompile | col -b | open -f

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Answer 2

softwater Author

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Mar 25, 2013 4:01 AM in response to Mark Jalbert

Yikes. 😮

Not familiar with Z shell. Anyway to do this in regular Bash? Alternatively, can I invoke Z shell via applescript's ''do shell script" command, and if so, any idea how?

OK, never mind. Figured all that out. Just need to type ZSH at the Terminal prompt to invoke the Z shell. Yes, works a treat. Question remains - anyway to do this with the Bash shell (I'm not sure all my users are going to have Z shell on their systems. Possible, but not as certain as that they'll have Bash).

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Answer 3

softwater Author

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5,556 points

Mar 25, 2013 4:06 AM in response to Mark Jalbert

OK, just realised the Z shell isn't necessary. Same thing works in Bash:

bash-3.2$ man osadecompile | col -b | open -f

Thanks! 🙂

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Answer 4

Mar 25, 2013 6:06 AM in response to softwater

Instead of displaying a man page in TextEdit where a user may inadvertently change the text, you can format the page in postscript and use Preview.app

man -t osadecompile | open -f -a /Applications/Preview.app

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Answer 5

Mar 25, 2013 7:34 AM in response to softwater

And if you are doing this to get the man page to display in a window rather then in the terminal you can highlight the command name anywhere in the terminal, right click it and choose 'Open man page' to have it open in its own window.

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Answer 6

softwater Author

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Mar 25, 2013 8:13 AM in response to Frank Caggiano

Great tip, Frank. Never thought of looking into contextual menus in Terminal.

Thanks for that tip about converting to ps, Mark. Alas I'm out of 'help' points, but it is much appreciated.

Thanks both. 🙂

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