Comments on: Unix Less Command: 10 Tips for Effective Navigation

By: Drizzt

Drizzt — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 13:45:19 +0000

Excelent! Thanks.

By: Avinash

Avinash — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 22:51:38 +0000

Thanks Mate ! Very useful!

By: geoff

geoff — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 17:32:02 +0000

thanks for the tip, very useful

By: Sadish

Sadish — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 10:26:57 +0000

NICE one. Helped a lot.

By: Chandana

Chandana — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 09:48:52 +0000

Please let me know how to do the following.

I want to limit the buffer space used by less to 2K
# export LESS=”-b2″
# cat file_sized_16K | less
In the less view, I enter
s
log file: mylog.txt
: q
I see that the log file is all the 16K and not limited to 2K buffer space that i specified.

Please give your inputs.

Thanks,
Chandana.

By: Brown

Brown — Wed, 26 May 2010 16:47:45 +0000

The &pattern command was apparently added after 418. The current version is 436, available here: http://www.greenwoodsoftware.com/less/download.html.

By: balta

balta — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 14:32:01 +0000

Unfortunately, tips 7 (&pattern) doesn’t work for me. This would be an invaluable feature for me . I’m using the latest version 418. Do I need a patch to get the &pattern command?

By: Jens

Jens — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 21:14:48 +0000

Hm, 7. “&pattern” doesn’t work here.

~/tmp$ less -V
less 418

By: Ramesh Raman

Ramesh Raman — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 12:04:52 +0000

Dear Ramesh,

First up all, I would like to thank you for your information. I highly enjoyed reading your article, keep up posting such good articles. at the same time you can release server(NFS,NIS,Apache,web,DNS,FTP) configuration related articles.

Regards Ramesh R

By: Ramesh Natarajan

Ramesh Natarajan — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 07:21:39 +0000

@thx4, Gareth, Athul, Raghu,

Thanks for your comments. You are right — Less is More.

@Papu,

Thanks for mentioning about -i command line option for less command.

For those who are interested, here is the info from man pages about the -i option.

       -i or --ignore-case
              Causes  searches  to ignore case; that is, uppercase and lower-
              case are considered identical.  This option is ignored  if  any
              uppercase letters appear in the search pattern; in other words,
              if a pattern contains uppercase letters, then that search  does
              not ignore case.

       -I or --IGNORE-CASE
              Like  -i, but searches ignore case even if the pattern contains
              uppercase letters.

@Geoff,

Yep. “F” option can come-in very handy while viewing a log file that keeps changing.