Re: [NT] Problem with `man' function

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: David Abrahams <address@hidden>
> Cc: address@hidden,  address@hidden
> Date: Thu, 27 Oct 2005 07:00:27 -0400
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > To try to debug and fix it, I need to know:
> >
> >   (1) What shell is being used to run the commands in the pipeline
> >       that produces the man page;
> 
> The regular Windows XP shell (CMD)
> 
> >   (2) What ports of gawk and Sed are used (presumably Cygwin, but
> >       that's a guess).
> 
> Cygwin
> GNU Awk 3.1.5
> GNU sed version 4.1.4

I tried to debug this, but I'm sorry to say that I cannot reproduce
exactly the behavior you describe.  "M-x man" indeed fails for me in
the Windows port, but the error message displayed by Emacs is
different:

    sed: -e expression #1, char 1: unknown command: `''
    awk: '
    awk: ^ invalid char ''' in expression

    process exited abnormally with code 1

The messages from Sed and Awk say quite unequivocally that the problem
is with the quoting style: Windows shells and programs don't support
the '..' quoting that man.el uses.

I tried to replace '..' quoting with ".." quoting, but then bumped
into other bugs, this time in Sed.  It sounds like the GnuWin32 port
of Sed is hopelessly broken.  Or it could be a bug with cmdproxy.exe,
I really don't have time to dig into that.

Perhaps with the Cygwin ports you have man.el will work if you replace
'..' quoting with ".." quoting in the Sed and Awk scripts used by
man.el.  Could you perhaps try that?

Failing that, I suggest to use woman.el.