Re: problems with less

[Bob McGowan <rmcgowan at veritas dot com>]

Chris Faylor wrote:
> 
> On Tue, May 09, 2000 at 03:38:21PM +0100, John S Cooper wrote:
> >
> >I think the display problems I was having with `less' disappear when I do the
> >following:
> >
> >  1. Set TERM=cygwin rather than TERM=linux.
> >  2. Don't use `less -r' as an alias for `less'.
> >
> >Perhaps this is something for a README/FAQ?
> 
> So, if you don't go out of your way to use less in a non-standard way, it
> works fine.  That doesn't seem like FAQ material to me.

The man page for 'less' says '-r' causes the program to output ASCII
control characters found in a file as the control character rather than
a symbol sequence like '^A', etc.  This is a standard documented
feature.  What was missing in this case was an understanding of what
this means to the terminal emulator.  For instance, if a <CR> (^R) was
embedded in a line, the remainder of the line would overwrite its
beginning.  If there is a form feed (^L if I remember correctly), the
screen might be cleared (depending on the TERM type, of course).  And so
on.

I agree that this is not a FAQ item.  The feature is already
documented.  It just requires a little analysis and thought, to
understand the potential consequences.

-- 
Bob McGowan
Staff Software Quality Engineer
VERITAS Software
rmcgowan@veritas.com

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