Re: [Help-bash] How to make man display ascii only on rxvt

[Greg Wooledge]

On Thu, Jul 21, 2016 at 06:03:52PM -0400, David Niklas wrote:
> It seems that my version of rxvt can't handle whatever encoding man gives
> it. So I do man -E ascii , but if I was using another terminal type
> (like the plain linux tty), then I would not need that argument.
> I tried to create a function that makes an alias for the man program, but
> that failed.

Sounds more like an operating system support question, but we can
try to help.

What is your current locale?  (Post the output of "locale".)

Which rxvt are you using?  If your locale is using a utf8 encoding, then
you should probably be using rxvt-unicode (a.k.a. urxvt).  The traditional
rxvt is suitable for single-byte encodings like iso88591.

Are there multiple systems involved?  E.g. are you logging directly into a
legacy Unix workstation and then using ssh to login to a modern Linux
system, and then running man on the Linux system?  If you have a setup
like this, with multiple conflicting encodings, then things will become
more complex -- but you would definitely need to *know* this and reveal
it because it would be an important component of the problem.

However, I give it about a 2/3 chance that using urxvt instead of rxvt
will solve the issue.