Effectively detaching 'less' from a pipe

[Kelly Jones]

I often run commands piped to 'less', to make sure the command is
working OK by looking at the first few lines of output.

Once I'm convinced, though, I'd like to "get rid" of less, and just
have the rest of stdout spewed to the terminal (and/or /dev/null
and/or to a file I specify).

In other words, I want to stop hitting 'space' until my program terminates.

How can I do this?

My current kludges (both ugly):

1. do "command > file" and then "tail -f file | less" (this mostly
works, but takes a while to get started because of buffering issues)

2. do "command | less", and once I'm happy w/ the output, hit 'q' to
quit less (and thus terminate program) and then do "command >
/dev/null" (works, but wastes time, since I have to run the command
once just to look at the first few lines and then abort it)

-- 
We're just a Bunch Of Regular Guys, a collective group that's trying
to understand and assimilate technology. We feel that resistance to
new ideas and technology is unwise and ultimately futile.