aha! I figured out why journalctl's auto-pager bugs me when git's doesn't (and possible solution)

Enrico Scholz enrico.scholz at informatik.tu-chemnitz.de
Thu Oct 18 08:35:03 UTC 2012


Matthew Miller <mattdm at fedoraproject.org> writes:

>   - don't auto-page;

yes; that's the best solution.  The auto-pager is perhaps the most
annoying feature of systemd.  I have no problem in scrolling back some
pages in my terminal with shift-pgup, but having a status request block
(plain 'systemctl' or 'journalctl' request a status) is just broken.

Or, do you want that e.g. the 'ls -l' output gets auto-paged?


I disabled it be setting an empty SYSTEMD_PAGER on my systems; but this
breaks piping into a pager.

E.g. 'systemctl | less -S' or 'journalctl | less -S' is useless because
most information were removed.  I have to remember non-consistent
options now, e.g. 'systemctl -a' has a complete different meaning than
'journalctl -a'.


Hence, the systemd tools should follow Unix/Linux tradition and specialize
on their core functionality and avoid implementing "features" breaking
user experience.  There are other tools like 'less' which are much better
suited for paging program output and concepts like pipes are well known
and used at thousands of other places.



Enrico



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