scripsit Ed Skinner:

>     I want "plain old ASCII" man-page output for cutting and pasting into 
> other documents. 
[...]
>      LANG is currently set to en_US.UTF-8. I can get a temporary fix:
>           LANG=C bootparam | col -b > clean.txt
>      This gives me what I want for the moment but I'd like a more permanent 
> solution. 

That's odd -- I should think it would be LC_CTYPE which controls this,
not LANG.  (At least that's how it works on my boxes...)

Why not make a little script that does what you want?  

#! /bin/bash
LC_CTYPE=C man $1 | col -b 

Just call it asciiman and dump it in /usr/local/bin ...

There's certainly a use for such a thing, but I wouldn't want to mess
with my default locale just for that...  

-- 
Pax vobiscum; pax cum omnibus.

Thanasis Kinias
tkinias at asu.edu
Doctoral Student, Department of History
Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona, U.S.A.