macOS less is not more

[jasnw]

Question for CLI users. I just switched from ElCap to High Sierra and one of the little unexpected changes was in the behavior of the 'more' command, which as we know is really 'less' these days. I use 'more' a lot in aliases ('ls -laF * | more' for example) and on ElCap when it came to the end of a file it would gracefully exit and drop me back into the shell (I run tcsh). Now, it stays in 'more' and the last line displayed is '(END)' and I have to explicitly exit the command (ENTER or q). If I start typing the next command I find myself in vi. Is there some toggle, or environment variable, that will change this behavior?

 

[chown33]

setenv LESS "-E"

man less

Also see less's -e option.

 

[jasnw]

Ah yes - should have done a 'man less | grep exit' before asking. Long day. Thanks.

Well, for some reason the environment variable approach doesn't work (tried any number of variations) but setting up an alias for both 'more' and 'less' adding the -e option works fine. It does raise the question of why this behavior changed between El Capitan and High Sierra. Something to ponder at 2AM.