Effectively detaching 'less' from a pipe

[Jerry McAllister]

On Mon, Feb 26, 2007 at 08:27:41PM -0700, Kelly Jones wrote:

> 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.

You got several good suggestions.
Along a somewhat different path, have you checked out  script(1).
It isn't quite what you are asking, but might also be helpful.

Just type 'script some_file_name'
and it will dump all screen output to that file until you exit script
with a CTRL-D.

////jerry

> 
> 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.
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