On Tue, 2013-07-16 at 15:06 -0500, Chris Adams wrote:
Once upon a time, John.Florian@dart.biz John.Florian@dart.biz said:
While I'm no more important than the next guy, I'll defend the auto-pager feature of both git and journalctl. I love it, in fact. I'm no stranger to very long pipelines and sub-shells but I see nothing but benefit in not having to add "| less" routinely to things that are UI in nature.
My primary objection is that I don't like things that have differing behavior between a TTY and a pipe. One problem is if you are writing a script to process output from something, you'll probably run the command in a TTY to check the output, but you'll get different results.
There are not many programs that have such TTY/pipe behavior. The only ones that come to mind are "ps" (where output is truncated at screen width)
Indeed, I've always thought it would be wonderful if "ps" could auto-page its output when run on TTY if the output is larger/longer than a screen.
It's just plain annoying to run a command, realize that the one piece of information you wanted is truncated out of the screen, and then have to run it second time with " | less" added.