Pete's Log: less

Entry #1206, (Coding, Hacking, & CS stuff)
(posted when I was 23 years old.)
So there is apparently a sequence of termcap initialization/deinit actions that various fancy terminal applications (such as emacs, lynx, pine, and less) use. The problem I've discovered is that on some terminal types, the deinit actions cause the terminal to be cleared (well, returned to the state it was in before the program ran). This is particularly annoying behavior with less, because often when I quit less (which is also my pager for man and such) I still wish to have the contents of the buffer I was looking at in the terminal. Since Eterm on malloc recently picked up the habit of clearing the screen when I quit less, I looked into this phenomenon.

I was unable to find a way to keep Eterm (or xterm) from clearing when termcap deinitialization took place, but I did find a way to force less to not do the init/deinit stuff. less -X will not clear the screen when I quit it, and that's good enough for me. In addition, less checks the LESS environment variable and considers the contents of it to be arguments passed on the command line. So instead of making an alias, I can simply 'setenv LESS -X' and now my man pages stay on the screen when I hit q. Yay!

In other news, the OIT is responsible for yet more amusement in my life: 

Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2002 11:16:41 -0500                                            
From: Don Steinke                                             
To: IRISHLINK-URGENT@listserv.nd.edu                                            
Subject: You have been added as moderator of IrishLink-urgent                   
                                                                                
Pam, Kim, Chuck, and Lora                                                       
                                                                                
        You have been added as moderators of the IrishLink-Urgent listserv. Any 
messages sent to the list will come to all of us for possible approval. If      
neither Harold or I are available to approve an urgent message any of you       
will now be able to use the "OK" reply to send a message. Even if multiple      
"OKs" are sent the message will only be distributed once. If you don't know     
how to approve a message see me and I will show you. DO NOT APPROVE THIS        
MESSAGE!!!! JUST DELETE IT. I just want to see if you are receiving             
messages sent to this listserv.                                                 
                                                                                
Thanks,                                                                         
                                                                                
        Don


Looking at the headers, it appears that Don himself is responsible for the message having been approved to delivery across the list.