Ideally, one should pipe into $PAGER, or, if that's missing, into "pager" (it's usually symlinked to less), or, if that's missing, into "less"/"more"/"cat", or, if even those are missing, then just write to stdout.

sometimes the simplest solution is the best! i love the unix philosophy:

Write programs that do one thing and do it well.

Write programs to work together.

Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.