Less first

19 June 2014

When working on a remote server, I use less instead of tail or vi to check files, the more I can.

filter

with &searchstring it will hide all lines not matching searchstring, like a very simple grep from the console
just & with nothing to get back to full view

edit file

when in less /etc/hosts if I find out I need to edit it I just type v it opens it in vi
when you quit the editor you are back in less

follow mode

when in less production.log, if you want to follow incoming changes type F it will become like a tail -f but it keeps the syntax highlighting that was made with a / search
when in follow mode with F you can ctrl-c any time and examine the new stuff
note that if you are in filter mode the follow respects it (like if you did a grep something/var/log/auth.log | grep 'Invalid user')

multifiles

you can open several file and navigate like in vim with :n and :p
when less is open you can open a new file with :e

call options inside less

you can call any launch option from inside less, one I use often is -S that will enable/disable wrapping of long lines, very useful when parsing web server log files
to disable/enable search highlighting just -G
any other launch option can be called from inside less, pretty convenient