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Comment by cbd1984 | Hacker News Reader

cbd1984

> The first time I accidentally ran "less" on a directory and it piped some version of "ls" into itself, I was mildly annoyed.

    % less .
    . is a directory
    % less imadir
    imadir is a directory

My point is, that behavior is a configuration issue on your end, not inherent to the less codebase.

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> My point is, that behavior is a configuration issue on your end, ...

On my end, and on every "end" where I ever log in. "less" works as a simple pager on my own system, but now I need to remember to possibly fix it everywhere else. "You can fix it in the config file" is not an excuse for broken-by-design software.

> ... not inherent to the less codebase.

Well yes, it kind of is. "less" used to be a better replacement for "more." Now it's something else, which should have a different name. Should "cat" be changed to automatically uncompress files and concatenate archives?

> Well yes, it kind of is. "less" used to be a better replacement for "more." Now it's something else, which should have a different name. Should "cat" be changed to automatically uncompress files and concatenate archives?

"less" already means "pager with all the bells and whistles". If you just want a simple pager, "more" is still there. How many fine gradations do you need?

Back in the old, old days, we all started using 'less' because 'more' did not have the ability to scroll backwards through a file. Nor was it buffering pipe input to enable similar functionality. It seems there has been a bit of feature creep in the ensuing 25 years...

Yup, cause apparenlty staying the same for 25 years is the new normal. Would you discard more too if it added the ability to page back in a document?

No, but if the maintainers added the ability to play MP3s and file my taxes, that is a cause for concern.

You could replace your less with the busybox version of less, which does not support LESSOPEN.

I believe that is the point of the linked email. Some distributions have less symlinked to something else (e.g. the lesspipe script) for convenience. Plain 'ol less isn't that much of a problem.

My understanding is that the less codebase has the hooks (LESSOPEN and LESSCLOSE), and it's configurable (by presence or absence of the variables) whether they're used.

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