[PLUG] A LESSer Problem

[Paul Heinlein]

On Tue, 14 Sep 2004, Rich Shepard wrote:

>  'less' has been acting strangely on the new Slackware-10.0 
> installation. I just reinstalled the package but have no better 
> behavior from the pager.
>
>  When I used it to view this one file this is what I see:
>
> [rshepard at salmo ~]$ less netstat-after_add less: Symbol `ospeed' has 
> different size in shared object, consider re-linking

I've seen similar symptoms when your non-interactive login environment 
emits character output beyond the shell prompt. If, for example, the 
window spawned by "xterm +ls" has any non-prompt text, then less will 
have trouble.

Also, you might consider seeing if you or the system has some alias 
for less that might be causing trouble:

   type less

As a final alternative, you might see if your shell environment has 
any of the LESS* variables defined in a funky way, e.g.,

   printenv | grep LESS

--Paul Heinlein <heinlein at madboa.com>