Name

less - A full-featured terminal pager.

Synopsis

$ cat file | less [-PXem]
$ less [-PXem] [file]
$ cat file | more
$ more [file]

Description

less is a terminal pager that allows backwards movement. It is inspired by, but largely incompatible with GNU less.

Options

• -P, --prompt: Set the prompt format string. See Prompts for more details.
• -X, --no-init: Don't switch to the xterm alternate buffer on startup.
• -e, --quit-at-eof: Immediately exit less when the last line of the document is reached.
• -m, --emulate-more: Apply -Xe, set the prompt to --More--, and disable scrollback. This option is automatically applied when less is executed as more

Commands

Commands may be preceded by a decimal number N. Currently, this feature does not exist, and no command use N.

Prompts

less accepts a special prompt string with the -P option. prompts accept a variety of format specifiers so that they adapt to less's state.

A % followed by a letter will be replaced with the associated variable. If such a variable does not exist, or currently has no value, it will be replaced with a ?.

A ? followed by a letter acts as an if expression on the associated condition. : then acts as the else, and . acts as the end token. for example if you wanted to print 'true' if you are at the end of the file and 'false' otherwise, your prompt would be ?etrue:false.. These expressions are arbitrarily nestable. If a condition does not exist, then it will always evaluate it's false branch.

A \\ followed by any character will be replaced with the literal value of the character. For instance, \\%l would render as %l.

All other characters are treated normally.

Examples

less's current default prompt: '?f%f :.(line %l)?e (END):.'

See Also

• more(1) For a simpler pager that less implements.
• man(1) For serenity's manual pager, that uses less.