default pager (csh)

[Kevin Oberman]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2015 at 5:10 PM, Warren Block <wblock at wonkity.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 19 Feb 2015, Julian Elischer wrote:
>
>  On 2/18/15 3:41 PM, Xin Li wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> The _only_ reason that I can think of is that more(1) does not clear
>>> screen for certain terminals (done with 'ti' and 'te' sequences),
>>> while less(1) when running as less does.
>>>
>>> The less(1) behavior can be annoying to some people (sometimes even
>>> myself when using less to show contents of a file and ^Z to paste
>>> them), and unfortunately quite a few of them also happen to be the
>>> more vocal ones when it comes to a change.
>>>
>>
>> I find that behaviour infuriating
>>
>> I page down to a place to get some text on the screen to use as  a
>> reference, then exit to run a command with that information, and *bam* the
>> info I wanted to use has gone away.
>>
>
> It doesn't do that on csh.  Or maybe I figured out how to prevent it long
> ago and forgot, but all I use is this:
>
> setenv  PAGER   "less -RS"
>

You probably did what I used to do. Modify the termcaps/terminfo to
eliminate this behavior. See Exorcising the Evil Alternate Screen
<http://shallowsky.com/linux/noaltscreen.html>.

In the past, FreeBSD disabled this by default. It was changed several years
ago, but you can change it back as per the aboved referenced article.
--
Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer, Retired
E-mail: rkoberman at gmail.com