From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2) Gecko/20021202 Description of problem: I would like to alias less to less -F so that I don't have to press q to quit less when viewing a short file. However, this only works on a real Linux console; in gnome-terminal, less displays files in a special virtual window or something, so the net effect is that less -F shortfile.txt does nothing. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Open a gnome-terminal 2. echo foo | less -F Actual Results: gnome-terminal flashes briefly and displays nothing Expected Results: "foo" should be output Additional info:
This bug still exists in Rawhide.
less uses ncurses for displaying file content on the screen and restores the original content on exit. Note that less is not intended for diplaying file contents on terminal non-interactively. You can use cat or something for this purpose instead.
I agree the -F option is useless though.
The -F option is not useless per se. It works fine on the linux console (and also in the "screen" terminal emulator, I have since found out). What I'm requesting here is for it to also work, in the same way, in the gnome-terminal terminal emulator. (The bug title could be better phrased, I admit.) What needs to be done here, I believe, is add logic to less to not send the special ANSI sequences that it normally sends, if -F is supplied and the file is less than one screenful long.
This looks like a termcap issue IMO. Maybe Petr will help here.
Created attachment 120251 [details] patch Discussed with jnovy. There was a patch for 'less' prepared. We will fix the issue above as BUG IN LESS. less-392-capa-te.patch
Petr, thanks for your help! Reassigning back to less.
Created attachment 120257 [details] A bit groomed patch applied to fix it.
Created attachment 120258 [details] Sorry, this is the right one.