Beebe@SCIENCE.UTAH.EDU ("Nelson H.F. Beebe") (08/01/89)
Using debug-on-entry, I tracked down the reason for M-x manual-entry hanging in GNU Emacs 18.54 under IBM RT AIX 2.2.1, which I left as an unsolved problem in a posting 2 days ago. Under AIX 2.2.1, man is not a program, but a shell script which tries to be smart. First, it uses the editor defined by the EDITOR environment variable for viewing the manual pages. Second, it uses compressed (ls.1.z, not ls.1.Z) manual page sources that are piped into the real man program from the undocumented (at least in the man pages) pcat filter. Third, it does not save the formatted output in the /usr/man/cat* directories. debug-on-entry showed that it hung, never to return, when call-process in manual-entry was executed; I had EDITOR set to /usr/local/bin/jove. Removing the definition of EDITOR removed the hanging; man's output was then correctly trapped by Emacs in a buffer. My access to this AIX system is via an X11 window on my Sun 3/110; it is possible that jove would work locally, but the IBM RT is geographically distant from my office, so I have not investigated further. -------