[lug:7827] Effectively detaching 'less' from a pipe

[Ryan Graham]

Check the man pages for tee and head. From your description, they may
work better. If nothing else, you can probably figure out something
better than what you're doing now.

And please don't cross-post. I highly doubt everyone on all those
lists/groups is subscribed to all the others.

~Ryan

On 2/26/07, Kelly Jones <kelly.terry.jones at gmail.com> 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.
>
> 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)
>