weird behaviour with 'less'

Aaron Gaudio prothonotar at tarnation.dyndns.org
Sat Apr 9 04:46:56 UTC 2005


On Fri, 2005-04-08 at 14:53 -0500, Gustavo Seabra wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I am experiencing a weird behaviour of the 'less' command. I wonder if
> anyone else has it. It looks to me that everytime I invoke less, like
> 
> > less somefile.txt
> 
> it re-sources my .cshrc before executing. For example,
> 

Check your $LESSOPEN environment variable. The default value for me is
"|/usr/bin/lesspipe.sh %s". If you look at /usr/bin/lesspipe.sh, it's a
(bourne) shell script. How or why this would end up executing a .cshrc,
I don't know, but that LESSOPEN thing has caused more pain for me than
it's helped (it never seems to work from an ssh terminal).

At any rate, many utilities will end up having this behaviour (I suspect
you may get the same thing trying to use /usr/bin/which). You may want
to consider moving that stuff out of your .cshrc and into your .login
file, so it only gets executed on login shells.

-- 
Aaron Gaudio <prothonotar at tarnation.dyndns.org>




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