Less ‘+>’ /path/to/file

less

So Gilles mentioned in the chat room that:

less '+>' /path/to/file

can be used with less in order to view a file in reverse. I've never seen it before.

I'm curious – what's going on with the +> operator in the title? Is this less specific syntax? Can it be used otherwise? Are there similar operators I should probably know about?

Best Answer

It's less specific (you can guess this with the quotes around the operator to avoid the shell interpreting it). The + argument tells less to apply this command after opening the file, in this case > which is the keystroke for going to the end of the file. You can try this out by opening some (long) file with less and hitting >. +> is just a shortcut for this. A fairly more common use-case you'll find in the wild is calling less +## /path/to/file where ## is a line number you want to be displayed by less.

At least +## also works for vi and emacs.

Related Solutions

Force less to display a file as text

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.

less stdout – How to Write Lines to a File from less

10Gmm1G|mcat > outfile.txt

(typed within less) seems to work as long as the input doesn't fit in one screen (in which case all the input ends up in outfile.txt for some reason).

10G brings you to line 10
mm sets the m mark there
1G (same as g in this case) brings you to line 1
|m pipe from the current line to mark m
cat > outfile.txt: that's piped to that command.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Force less to display a file as text

less stdout – How to Write Lines to a File from less

Related Question