[ILUG] less problem

[Niall O Broin]

On Wed, Feb 07, 2001 at 11:31:14AM -0000, Paul Askins wrote:

> I think I've found the problem
> [jock at george2 ~]$ setenv | grep LESS
> LESSKEY=/etc/.less=
> LESS=-MM=
> LESS=-MMN=
> 
> that extra '=' at the end is most likely the problem since it dowsn't exist in
> the bash environment.  I tried re-setting with
> setenv LESS=-MM
> for example but it keeps appending the equals to the end again.  Anyone any
> ideas what's adding that?  I haven't given it much thought as I'm having more

Hmm, peculiar. setenv is a C shell construct, not bash. I actually thought
it was in bash but I just checked on bash2 and bash1 and setenv doesn't
exist. So, what shell ARE you using exactly ? tcsh is on most distributions,
so perhaps you're using that.

And that bloody = sign is a head hurter in (t)csh anyway. You do NOT use =
with setenv, whereas you do with set so in (t)csh

set name=Paul		# give name the value Paul in this shell only
setenv name Paul	# give name the value Paul in this shell and its children
setenv name=Paul	# give name=Paul a null value in this shell and its children

so as you can see from the last example, this is the source of your problem.
You're not creating an environment variable LESS with value -MM but rather
an environment variable LESS=-MM with null value.

> is a hard reset and then sitting through 40gig of fsck.  Anyway, enough ranting

No diea what's happening to your box, but you can get over the waiting
through fsck by changing that big filesystem to ReiserFS. If that's
unacceptable :-) change your fstab so that that FS is mounted RO, then you
can remount it RW if the box comes up OK - naturally only something to do
for testing. Could also make it a non-auto mounted FS, I suppose. Of course
if it's your root filesystem, then you've got a problem and you deserve what
you get :-)



Regards,


Niall