Passing Strings in MANPAGER Doesn't Work

[JacobTDC]

Passing strings in the MANPAGER variable doesn't work, for example:

$ export MANPAGER="sh -c 'col -bx | bat -l man -p'"
$ man 2 select

-bx: 1: -bx: Syntax error: Unterminated quoted string

This happens regardless of the shell I'm using, and even if I change the sh to bash, dash, or fish. For some reason, man doesn't understand strings and spaces in the MANPAGER variable.

[ghost]

We use a different implementation of man - http://mdocml.bsd.lv instead of https://www.nongnu.org/man-db/ because it is lightweight.

Issue is not Termux-specific and happens in Alpine Linux too and possibly other distributions where mdocml is used.

[JacobTDC]

@xeffyr, then how would I make the above code work? I mean, I could just make an executable script file for it, but that's not a very elegant solution...

[ghost]

then how would I make the above code work?

mdocml does very basic parsing of MANPAGER. It splits arguments by space so calling sh here will not work.

You need to use wrapper here.