Force less to display a file as text

less

Sometimes less wrongly recognize file as binary and tries to show hexdump on LHS (usually ones with non-alphanumeric characters but still containing printable ASCII characters). How to force it to recognize it as text?

Best Answer

I think you have (or your distribution has) a LESSOPEN filter set up for less. Try the following to tell less to not use the filter:

less -L my_binary_file

For further exploration, also try echo $LESSOPEN. It probably contains the name of a shell script (/usr/bin/lesspipe for me), which you can read through to see what sort of filters there are. Also try man less, and read the Input Preprocessor section.

Related Solutions

Shift-Space in less

I think you've brought up a culture clash caused by a technical limitation. Since Shift+Space generates the same output as Space, the Unix terminal model treats them identically. To distinguish between the two, you need a programming environment that supports key up / key down events. That is possible in X11 and in terminal emulators that support remapping keys. An example of remapping Shift+Space to PageUp:

# For [u]rxvt, in ~/.Xdefaults:
URxvt.keysym.Shift-space: \033[5~

Why do less search result lines disappear/reappear

This is a (very old) bug in less which seems to be related to line counting when line folding is on. There isn't much you can do (other than contacting the developers and asking them to fix it...)

My personal workaround has been to use -S to tell less to not fold lines. It seems to go away then. However, if the thing you're searching for is in the bit that would have been folded down had you not used -S, you'll need to scroll to the right to see it. Note that you can specify additional options when less is already started, by just entering them at the : prompt.

Alternatively, you could switch away from less to a different pager. If you just want to look at a file, view (part of the vim suite) may work. Basically, if you call view, you're running vim, but telling it to only open files in read-only mode (so you can't accidentally modify it).

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Shift-Space in less

Why do less search result lines disappear/reappear

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