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Comments on Make Less use a normal view instead of hexdump view

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Make Less use a normal view instead of hexdump view

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Less does not display data files normally, but if it were some sort of Xxd.

$ bash --norc
$ export LESS=
$ file -i /var/log/lastlog
/var/log/lastlog: application/octet-stream; charset=binary
$ less -EX /var/log/lastlog
00000000  a3 4c d2 60 74 74 79 32  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |.L.`tty2........|
00000010  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
*
000474a0  ee c7 66 61 74 74 79 31  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |..fatty1........|
000474b0  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
*
000475c0  00 00 00 00                                       |....|
000475c4

Usually that is a good choice, but some data files are better read as normal text. How can I switch to the normal, plain text view in Less?

I have searched for "binary", "hex" and "xxd" in Less' manual but there does not seem to be a mention of it.

An update just to situate Canina's correct answer.

$ env | grep LESS
LESS=-iRj4
LESSOPEN=|lesspipe %s

lesspipe is a shell script with # Copyright 1999-2020 Gentoo Authors, so it is no surprise that many could not reproduce what I described.

less

posted about 3 years ago

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2 comment threads

norepro (2 comments)

What is in your ~/.bashrc? (2 comments)

Canina‭ wrote about 3 years ago · edited about 3 years ago

That's not what it does to me; with less 551, I get the expected semi-binary view rather than a hexdump-style view.

A few things of note:

That new bash session might not itself read the shell initialization files, but it's going to inherit the environment from the spawning shell. That could influence things.

You could have an alias for less that includes parameters. Try alias less or type less or use the full path explicitly for invocation. (which less if you're not sure where it is on your system, but should be /usr/bin/less or maybe /bin/less.)

less uses a number of environment variables, not just $LESS. Something like man less | tr ' ' $'\n' | grep ^LESS | sort --unique is imperfect, but provides a reasonable starting point. Also check env | grep ^LESS.