A man/less Trick
I regularly use man pages. I also regularly use less to view files I wanna read.
$ man vsftpd.conf
$ man named.conf
$ man less
$ less README
$ less CHANGES
and so on and so forth. But one of the most annoying things about the default setting to less. The one that I wonder what the devs were thinking when they created this application, is the way that it works by default. When I exit from one of my man pages, or when I finish reading a document using less, I discover that the page has disappeared. Gone!
No text! Zip, nada, buh-bye!
Annoying!!
So today in class, one of my students asked me if there was a way to fix this problem. I said that I thought there was, but couldn’t remember the option. I found that switch and thought that others might like to know as well.
The option is -X. If you run man less you will find it in the OPTIONS section. The only trick is, I didn’t want to create an alias for it, but rather wanted it to be the default. Luckily for me, there is an environment variable called LESS that I can set, so that’s what I did.
I added the following to the bottom of my ~/.bashrc file:
export LESS=”-isXf”
and I modified my /etc/man.config file to match:
PAGER /usr/bin/less -isXf
Now, when I hit the q button either in a man page or when I less a text document, the content stays on the screen. Very nice!
Cheers,
Herlo
on April 17, 2007 at 7:38 am
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Yay! Thanks. Ever since I switched to Linux at work from FreeBSD this has annoyed the hell out of me.
It never happened on FreeBSD. Probably because of the termcap differences.