From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Nov 9 00:33:02 2007 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5FAC216A41A for ; Fri, 9 Nov 2007 00:33:02 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from chuckr@chuckr.org) Received: from mail8.sea5.speakeasy.net (mail8.sea5.speakeasy.net [69.17.117.10]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0E16313C4A7 for ; Fri, 9 Nov 2007 00:33:01 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from chuckr@chuckr.org) Received: (qmail 13890 invoked from network); 9 Nov 2007 00:32:06 -0000 Received: from april.chuckr.org (chuckr@[66.92.151.30]) (envelope-sender ) by mail8.sea5.speakeasy.net (qmail-ldap-1.03) with AES256-SHA encrypted SMTP for ; 9 Nov 2007 00:32:06 -0000 Message-ID: <4733AA45.6030905@chuckr.org> Date: Thu, 08 Nov 2007 19:31:01 -0500 From: Chuck Robey User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.8.1.9) Gecko/20071107 SeaMonkey/1.1.6 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: a better lesskey helper X-BeenThere: freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-current List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 09 Nov 2007 00:33:02 -0000 Well, I've taken a rather lengthy vacation from FreeBSD, trolling around Linux, so I could try to see if I was right in my presonal prejudice of FreeBSD being better. While I did prove myself right there, I did happen to find a few pearls (no, NOT perls!) of wisdom out amongst the Linux-folks. One of those pearls that I really do think we could stand to bring aboard is a file "/usr/bin/lesspipe.sh" When you couple that with a one-liner, a alias that gets stuck in one of the shell template files in /etc. making less even more functional than it is now, most especially for programmers. It causes less to automatically recognize a couiple more binary types than it does now. While it now currenlty recognizes several compresed archive types, so it can automatically decompress them and display them, it adds recognition of executables and libraries, and automatically routes them thru objdump, so you get all the info you'd probably be likely to want, short of a full binary dump. Seeing as I personally have a hard time remembering all the various parameters to objdump, I like this behavior quite a bit. Tell you what. If you would like to see what I mean, just write me, and (assuming that I don't actually get totally buried underneath a avalanche of requests!) I will try to send you a copy of the lesspipe.sh file, and the line to stick in your shell startup file. Seeing as I'm no committer any longer, perhaps someone else might decided that this file is actually as nice as I say it is, and commit it the the sources, maybe increasing the size of our currently installed lesspipe.sh file. Real source of this? It's from Gentoo Linux, which is in my own opinion the only Linux that any FreeBSDer ought to consider using. They have a check of a nice etc file control system (called rc-update), nice enough to warrant those of you who are curious to take a look. Really. Well, I do hope I'm not just wasting your time.