the new Linux distro (again)

[Christopher Reid Palmer <chrisp@dusk.bitstream.net>]

I found some old stuffs in my inbox that I wanted to address.

> carls@agritech.com, on 04/03/2000 03:20:24 PM

> >help(1) would detect that you don't have an HTML reader and convert to
> >ASCII instead, then run that through less. 
>
>         how would it detect that you don't have an HTML reader?

Just like many other Unix programs, it would have compile-time defaults,
global rc file options, user rc file options, and command-line options. In
any of those places you could specify an HTML reader for X and one for
CLI, as well as an ASCII reader. If there are no valid options in the
local configuration, it will fall back on compiled-in defaults. If you
don't have less, more, or pg, well you have other problems besides not
being able to read stuff from this program...

>         what if you had some "uncommon" reader (Amaya, Gzilla, Xemacs, or a
> renamed executable)?

See above. You could use shell scripts, too.


--
Christopher Reid Palmer : innerfireworks.com