National Radio
Astronomy Observatory

1.3.8.3 help and PAGER

Your PAGER environment variable (§ 1.3.1) determines how help is displayed in the terminal window where you start CASA. If you set your bash environment variable PAGER=less (setenv PAGER less in csh) then typing help <taskname> will show you the help but the text will vanish and return you to the command line when you are done viewing it. Setting PAGER=more (setenv PAGER more) will scroll the help onto your command window and then return you to your prompt (but leaving it on display). Setting PAGER=cat (setenv PAGER cat) will give you the more equivalent without some extra formatting baggage and is the recommended choice.

If you have set PAGER=more or PAGER=less, the help display will be fine, but the display of ’taskname?’ will often have confusing formatting content at the beginning (lots of ESC surrounding the text). This can be remedied by exiting casapy and doing an ’unset PAGER’ (unsetenv PAGER in [t]csh) at the Unix command line.

You can see the current value of the PAGER environment variable with CASA by typing:

(note the double $$). This will show what command paging is pointed to.

More information about CASA may be found at the CASA web page

Copyright © 2010 Associated Universities Inc., Washington, D.C.

This code is available under the terms of the GNU General Public Lincense