Ah fair enough. The few times I have seen this issue was when jumping on old Solaris SPARC boxes which also mangled the the backspace key in the interactive ter

Ah fair enough. The few times I have seen this issue was when jumping on old Solaris SPARC boxes which also mangled the the backspace key in the interactive terminal. So it sounds like I've put 2 and 2 together and gotten 5. Though coincidentally I do the redirect trick a lot as was as querying the gzipped raw files too (one of the projects I'm working on requires building a cutdown man page parser).