exit behavior of less (the pager)

sustik · 01-19-2012, 07:20 PM

When I hit q to leave less, the displayed contents disappear. I thought that that cannot be helped, until I saw on a linux machine the following behavior: upon pressing q and leaving less) the portion of the file displayed stayed on the screen.

Unfortunately, I did not ask how that was done. I checked the man page for less and there is nothing relevant.

I am running debian wheezy.

Thanks!

Dark_Helmet · 01-19-2012, 07:51 PM

Take a look at this page

While I have not tried it myself, read the "Can less leave the screen alone when it quits?" question.

sustik · 01-19-2012, 10:27 PM

And indeed, knowing the switch allowed me to find in the man page:

-X or --no-init
Disables sending the termcap initialization and deinitialization
strings to the terminal. This is sometimes desirable if the
deinitialization string does something unnecessary, like clear‐
ing the screen.

Thanks! I am using the following alias that benefits from the above:

dir () {
ls --color=always -h -t -g -G -B --time-style=iso "$@" | less -R -X
}