Less Command – How to Write All Lines to a File

less

I've piped a command to less, and now I want to save the command's output to a file. How do I do that?

In this case, I don't want to use tee, I want a solution directly from less, so that I don't have to rerun a long-running command if I forgot to use tee.

This question is similar to this one, the only difference is that I want to save all of the lines, not a subset: Write lines to a file from less

Best Answer

From less, type s then type the file name you want to save to, then Enter.
From the man page, under COMMANDS:

s filename
      Save the input to a file.  This only works if the input is a pipe, not an ordinary file.

man page also states that, depending on your particular installation, the s command might not be available. In that case, you could go to line 1 with:

g or < or ESC-<
      Go to line N in the file, default 1 (beginning of file).

and pipe the whole content to cat with:

| <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.

so either:

g|$cat > filename

or:

<|$cat > filename

i.e. type g or < (g or less-than) | $ (pipe then dollar) then cat > filename and Enter.
This should work whether input is a pipe or an ordinary file.

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