so it seems ( at least on xterm ) that quitting more when I piped in output
from a custom program will leave the terminal hanging at times and I notice that the program leaks memory with valgrind. What is the typical approach to writing programs so that they leave most safely when quitting more/less? Don't ask me for the prog code I don't have it with me, but it's just like a program that reads in a file buffer prints it's contents to stdout and frees the buffer .
I sorta don't get why quitting more/less has to kill the piped process along with it?
is it impossible to implement repiping or dumping to /dev/null?

you can use "myprogram &" that way it will keep going while giving you the shell back. As for repiping, no, the shell use somewhat static pipe and filter architecture. While one of the program can crash in some circumstances, the command is the sum of the pipes. Kill one and that end the command. As for the free thing, just use apps that doesn't leak.

the problem with myprog & is that I like to see the output of more in the current terminal, but I want to be able to quit with long outputs after I've seen enough and I may not have been clear but the leaked memory is occuring with programs that don't leak e.g. cleanup is performed at the end of main.
I get that quitting more would stop the rest of the original program output but it seems that it also gets terminated before having a chance to clean anything and
I wouldn't have a problem with that except that on some occasions I'm getting a hanging terminal.

I'm not 100% clear on what your prog invocation looks like, but something like this would work
I've used this a lot...

ok, thx for the help guys.