in reply to PIPE less

I'd say don't do this.

If your user wants to view the help in less, it's easy enough for them to pipe your script to less themselves. With an implicit less you also make it harder to just dump out the whole help.

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Re^2: PIPE less
by FunkyMonk (Bishop) on Apr 16, 2010 at 15:51 UTC
    My less (version 436 by Mark Nudelman) doesn't page unless its STDOUT is connected to a terminal
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      For the reason outlined by BrowserUK below, I often like to just dump the help to stdout so I can use (in most terminals) Shift-PgUp and Shift-PgDown to look through it while actually typing the command.

      Of course that's still possible either way. Doing something like "program --help | cat" could probably trick less into thinking it's not connected to a terminal.

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Re^2: PIPE less
by choroba (Cardinal) on Apr 16, 2010 at 14:19 UTC
    Which leads back to my answer, Re: PIPE less, giving the user more options (usually usage, help and man).
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