view mercurial/help/pager.txt @ 35460:8652ab4046e4

osutil: add a function to unblock signals

Signals could be blocked by something like:

  #include <unistd.h>
  #include <signal.h>
  int main(int argc, char * const argv[]) {
    sigset_t set;
    sigfillset(&set);
    sigprocmask(SIG_BLOCK, &set, NULL);
    execv("/bin/hg", argv);
    return 0;
  }

One of the problems is if SIGCHLD is blocked, chgserver would not reap
zombie workers since it depends on SIGCHLD handler entirely.

While it's the parent process to blame but it seems a good idea to just
unblock the signal from hg. FWIW git does that for SIGPIPE already [1].

Unfortunately Python 2 does not reset or provide APIs to change signal
masks. Therefore let's add one in osutil. Note: Python 3.3 introduced
`signal.pthread_sigmask` which solves the problem.

`sigprocmask` is part of POSIX [2] so there is no feature testing in
`setup.py`.

[1]: https://github.com/git/git/commit/7559a1be8a0afb10df41d25e4cf4c5285a5faef1
[2]: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xsh/sigprocmask.html

Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D1736

Some Mercurial commands can produce a lot of output, and Mercurial will
attempt to use a pager to make those commands more pleasant.

To set the pager that should be used, set the application variable::

  [pager]
  pager = less -FRX

If no pager is set in the user or repository configuration, Mercurial uses the
environment variable $PAGER. If $PAGER is not set, pager.pager from the default
or system configuration is used. If none of these are set, a default pager will
be used, typically `less` on Unix and `more` on Windows.

.. container:: windows

  On Windows, `more` is not color aware, so using it effectively disables color.
  MSYS and Cygwin shells provide `less` as a pager, which can be configured to
  support ANSI color codes.  See :hg:`help config.color.pagermode` to configure
  the color mode when invoking a pager.

You can disable the pager for certain commands by adding them to the
pager.ignore list::

  [pager]
  ignore = version, help, update

To ignore global commands like :hg:`version` or :hg:`help`, you have
to specify them in your user configuration file.

To control whether the pager is used at all for an individual command,
you can use --pager=<value>:

  - use as needed: `auto`.
  - require the pager: `yes` or `on`.
  - suppress the pager: `no` or `off` (any unrecognized value
    will also work).

To globally turn off all attempts to use a pager, set::

  [ui]
  paginate = never

which will prevent the pager from running.