Home / server / Questions / 850491
In Process
gcb
Asked: 2017-05-17 10:22:21 +0800 CST

How to set LESSCHARSET system wide?

  • 772

This is a follow up on How to make the 'less' command handle UTF-8?

If I want to set options for less globally, so that each user doesn't have to fiddle with their own env vars (.basrc, etc) individually, where should it be set?

/etc/bashrc is not a good option as then I'd have to set one up for each shell.

The man page for less mention a lesskey file that has a #env section where i can set this, but there is no mention of where to put it. It does mention that I can use env vars LESSKEY_SYSTEM and LESSKEY to point to the file... but that creates a chicken vs egg problem.

Other distros man pages mention /usr/local/etc/sysless but that is not used on ubuntu from my tests.

ubuntu

1 Answers

  1. strace to the rescue.

    open("/usr/bin/.sysless", O_RDONLY)     = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/etc/sysless", O_RDONLY)          = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/home/user/.less", O_RDONLY)      = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/home/user/.lesshst", O_RDONLY)   = 3

    /usr/bin/.sysless is very odd. let's skip that. /etc/sysless sounds more sane. I think this is the answer. I can't say for sure because now less gives me

    Cannot use lesskey file "/etc/sysless"

    Still need to debug that since the contents of that file for now are copied from the man page...

    • 2