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Ben Williams
Asked: 2009-06-26 12:21:28 +0800 CST

Is there a way to configure bash to always page output?

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I'd like to configure bash to page the output of all commands. Essentially, I want bash to behave as if every command I enter ended with '| less'. Is this possible?

bash shell paging

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You could do this:

    $ bind '"\C-j": "|less\C-m"'

    Or put this in your ~/.inputrc:

    "\C-j": "|less\C-m"

    Then when you want to do ls -l|less you'd type ls -l and press control-J instead of <enter>.

    I would not recommend swapping the j and m in the bind command (or in the .inputrc file). Every time you'd press <enter> you'd get |less added which could be pretty annoying.

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  2. I'm not sure if this is possible, but you can definitely make it easier on yourself by doing something like this in your .bashrc:

    alias p='less'

    ll |p then becomes a paged listing.

    EDIT: As a note though this still wont work for something that is going to STDERR. You would need to something like: errorcommand 2>&1 |p

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