When piping command output into less, I'll scroll to the bottom of the output using the mouse and I'll find less gets stuck in forward scrolling, preventing me from scrolling back through output. This is the same behaviour as pressing F. Is there a way to unlock less from forward scroll?
Reproduce: docker-compose up | less
followed by pressing F.
Best Answer
Yes.
I believe
less
actually says "Waiting for data... (interrupt to abort)" upon entering this mode, at least when the left hand side of the pipeline is not producing data fast enough."Interrupt" means "Press Ctrl+C". This will send the INT (interrupt) signal to the
less
process.Ctrl+C will send the INT signal to whatever program currently is in the foreground in the shell, just like doing
kill -s INT pid
from another terminal would do (wherepid
might be the process ID of theless
process, for example). Fun fact.To avoid sending the interrupt signal to the data-producing command on the left hand side of the pipeline, you could make that command ignore that signal completely: