Hi,
I found this bug report from 2006 after thinking that I had run into the
same problem. But then I noticed that parts #1 and #4 of the bug report
are not actually bugs, except maybe in that the documentation could be
more clear.
Apparently less has a slightly unusual way of reading its configuration:
less reads ~/.less but this is _not_ a text file containing settings;
instead, the user should write settings in ~/.lesskey and then run the
lesskey command which reads ~/.lesskey and generates ~/.less (which
appears to be in some binary format).
For instance, these commands make less -M the default option (which I
used to always set in my .profile until now):
$ echo -e '#env\nLESS=-M' >.lesskey
$ lesskey
This is documented in the first (long) paragraph of the lesskey(1)
manual page, but it appears that I didn't read the paragraph to the end
before trying to write a ~/.less file and wondering why it doesn't
work...
Parts #2 and #3 of the original bug report (location of /etc/sysless)
still exist, though. Perhaps the Debian manual page (less(1), KEY
BINDINGS section) could be edited to mention that the file is
/etc/sysless on Debian. (However, since /etc/sysless is also not a text
file but generated by lesskey, possibly Debian should also specify a
default location for the corresponding lesskey input file, e.g.,
/etc/syslesskey.)
Actually, for some reason less seems to look at /usr/bin/.sysless as
well, but that doesn't normally exist so I guess it doesn't matter:
$ strace -eopen less xxxxx
open("/etc/ld.so.cache", O_RDONLY) = 3
open("/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libtinfo.so.5", O_RDONLY) = 3
open("/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6", O_RDONLY) = 3
open("/lib/terminfo/x/xterm", O_RDONLY) = 3
open("/usr/bin/.sysless", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/etc/sysless", O_RDONLY) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/home/rjs/.less", O_RDONLY) = 3
open("/home/rjs/.less", O_RDONLY) = 3
open("/usr/lib/locale/locale-archive", O_RDONLY) = 3
open("/home/rjs/.lesshst", O_RDONLY) = 3
open("/dev/tty", O_RDONLY) = 3
open("xxxxx", O_RDONLY) = 5
$
I assume the reason for this unusual way of reading configuration is to
make less start up faster because it doesn't have to parse a text file;
but I'm not sure how relevant that is nowadays when CPUs are fast.
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