On Fri, Oct 01, 2021 at 05:44:41PM -0700, Fred wrote: > man command | col -b > command.txt
Curious. unicorn:~$ man ls > ls1 unicorn:~$ man ls | col -b > ls2 unicorn:~$ ls -l ls1 ls2 -rw-r--r-- 1 greg greg 8299 Oct 1 20:49 ls1 -rw-r--r-- 1 greg greg 7745 Oct 1 20:49 ls2 Glancing at the diff -u between the two files, most of the changes appear to be whitespace related. Opening them both in vim, the second one has a bunch of literal tab characters, whereas the first one has no tabs at all -- only spaces. So I guess most (or all?) of the size reduction is groups of spaces being replaced by tabs.