{"id":304,"date":"2006-08-10T17:22:15","date_gmt":"2006-08-11T00:22:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/less-brainpower\/"},"modified":"2006-08-13T18:19:18","modified_gmt":"2006-08-14T01:19:18","slug":"less-brainpower","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/multimedia.cx\/eggs\/less-brainpower\/","title":{"rendered":"Less Brainpower"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Has anyone else noticed how the GNU &#8216;less&#8217; command has been getting really smart, perhaps too smart for its own good? When you aim the command at a non-text file, it does its best to interpret the type and display it in a readable manner.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>source code:<\/strong> &#8216;less&#8217; originally displayed the text unadorned. Now it calls some program to colorize the syntax, which is nice, except when it&#8217;s an inordinately large source file on a rather slow computer and the external colorizer program takes forever. Ctrl-C asks the colorizer to quit and allows &#8216;less&#8217; to process with the regular text.<\/li>\n<li><strong>HTML:<\/strong> &#8216;less&#8217; used to show you the raw HTML text. The programs now formats the HTML the best it can.<\/li>\n<li><strong>directories:<\/strong> &#8216;less&#8217; used to advise you that the requested target was actually a directory. Now it offers a directory listing.<\/li>\n<li><strong>ELF:<\/strong> &#8216;less&#8217; used to inform you that the file appeared binary in nature and asked if you still wanted &#8216;less&#8217; to try to display it anyway. Now it parses header information, apparently using &#8216;readelf -a&#8217;.<\/li>\n<li><strong>binary:<\/strong> Like ELF, &#8216;less&#8217; used to notify you that the data appears binary. Now it shows you a rudimentary hex view. This confused me the most. &#8220;Wait, does this file actually contain a text listing of a hex dump?&#8221; I then have to open a proper hex editor to verify that this is not the case.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Has anyone else noticed how the GNU &#8216;less&#8217; command has been getting really smart, perhaps too smart for its own good? When you aim the command at a non-text file, it does its best to interpret the type and display it in a readable manner. source code: &#8216;less&#8217; originally displayed the text unadorned. Now it [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t<!-- All in One SEO 4.9.10 - aioseo.com -->\n\t<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Has anyone else noticed how the GNU &#039;less&#039; command has been getting really smart, perhaps too smart for its own good? When you aim the command at a non-text file, it does its best to interpret the type and display it in a readable manner. source code: &#039;less&#039; originally displayed the text unadorned. 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