Re: [OFF-TOPIC] less with built-in grep ?
In an attempt to save the world from disaster, Ben Pfaff wrote:
> With the example above, I suppose I could write some kind of macro, opening
> shell output, but it gets much more interesting when I am looking at
>
> program | less
>
> and I do not want to execute program again, and I also want to be able to go
> back to un-grepped output without executing program again.
>
> You can type |grep xxx | less, and this will open a sub-less with the
> grep output in it. To get back to the ungrepped file, just quit from
> the sub-less.
Interesting. But it doesn't work for me, as my less seems to want
the following syntax (from the man page:)
| <m> shell-command
<m> represents any mark letter. Pipes a section of
the input file to the given shell command. The
section of the file to be piped is between the
first line on the current screen and the position
marked by the letter. <m> may also be ^ or $ to
indicate beginning or end of file respectively. If
<m> is . or newline, the current screen is piped.
As such, the only way I can do what he wanted is by typing
g|$grep xxx|less
(where the first "g" shifts less to the top of the file, so that
the "$" results in displaying the wole file. "G|^grep xxx|less" would
have done the trick as well, "!grep xxx %|less", but the latter only
works if the input is a real file)
Seems rather strange to me that the authors forgot to think of a way to
just tell the "|" command "I want the whole file/input".
$ less -V
less version 332
$ dpkg -l less
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge
| Status=Not/Installed/Config-files/Unpacked/Failed-config/Half-installed
|/ Err?=(none)/Hold/Reinst-required/X=both-problems (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name Version Description
+++-===============-==============-============================================
ii less 332-2 A file pager program, similar to more(1)
--
joost witteveen, joostje@debian.org
The upstream maintainer is allowed to do things different
than Debian, but only if he has good reasons to do so.
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