Re: less: extra entries for lesspipe

[Ben Pfaff <pfaffben@pilot.msu.edu>]

   > What would be the use of looking at a screen full of control characters?

   Because when I look at a binary with less, I *mean* to do
   that... usually to look for corruption (blocks of nulls) or things
   like *short* strings or strings not in the text section, that
   "strings" *won't find*.

No kidding.  I do the same thing quite often myself, generally when
I'm debugging a low-level tool.  However, you can get around this, if
lesspipe is `too smart', by simply doing `cat binary|less' instead of
`less binary'.

So I think the default should be to give some sort of useful display
for a binary file, although a display from `strings' is not my idea of
`useful'.  OTOH, the output of `objdump' or `nm -s' might often be
useful.


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