Less
Less is a program similar to more, i.e. a terminal based program for viewing text files and the output from other programs. Less offers many features beyond those that more does. For instance, it allows backward movement in the files as well as forward.
| Tags | Text Processing |
|---|---|
| Licenses | GPLv3 |
Recent releases
- 30 May 2009 20:02
Changes: Binary file detection in UTF-8 mode was fixed. Non-ANSI-compliant code that caused problems with some compilers was modified. Display problems with long lines on "ignaw" terminals were resolved. A problem with the interrupting of the line number calculation for initial prompt was fixed. A highlighting bug when searching for underlined or overstruck text was fixed. The new "&" command allows filtering of lines based on a pattern. The status column now displays a search match, even if the matched string is scrolled off screen. Several other minor modifications and fixes were made.
- 27 Jan 2008 13:05
Changes: A search bug when using "-R" with text containing ANSI color escape sequences, a crash when using "-r" with UTF-8 text containing 0x9B bytes, and a display bug were fixed. The license was updated to the GPLv3.
- 27 Nov 2007 00:59
No changes have been submitted for this release.
- 25 Oct 2007 11:48
No changes have been submitted for this release.
- 25 Jan 2006 08:18
No changes have been submitted for this release.
- All comments
Recent commentslesspipe.sh filters
One of the features of less is piping the file to be viewed through a filter program (usually called lesspipe.sh) before viewing it. This means that gzipped files can be decompressed, troff source formatted, HTML rendered into plain text, and so on. Typically lesspipe.sh is a shell script which runs different filters depending on the input filename.
The standard distribution of less does not include a lesspipe.sh, but there is one included in the less package from Red Hat (http://rpmfind.net//linux/RPM/rawhide/1.0/s390/SRPMS/less-378-2.src.html) (and related distributions) and another with Slackware. Wolfgang Friebel's lesspipe.sh (http://www-zeuthen.desy.de/~friebel/unix/lesspipe.html) is unusual in that it uses file(1) to look at the file's contents.