From: David Kågedal Date: Thu, 15 Sep 2005 17:48:27 GMT Subject: Re: "Read my lips: no more merges" - aka Linux 2.6.14-rc1 Message-ID: In-Reply-To: Linus Torvalds writes: > They have "sensible-pager", but not "less"? No, you read my message wrong, or I failed to describe it properly. sensible-pager is just an indirection that uses your preferred pager. This will usually be less, but if a user prefers to use e.g. "w3m" (or "more") that can be done by reconfiguring a symlink (using the update-alternatives program, or even a GUI such as galternatives). So no, they haven't replaced less with sensible-pager. They just provided another way to select which pager you want. Setting $PAGER will still work the trick. Running "sensible-pager" will check $PAGER an run that if set, otherwise run the pager selected via the alternatives sytem, which will usually be "less". The alternatives selection is done with a symlink called "/usr/bin/pager". The advantage is, I guess, consistency. Different programs don't have to encode their own default pager. To summarize: on a Debian system with "less" as the preferred pager, these four invokations are equal: $ ${PAGER:-less} $ sensible-pager $ pager $ less If you set $PAGER to something else, the first two variants will run $PAGER, while the last two will still run "less". -- David Kågedal