LESSECHO(1)

📦
version 710 · 10 versions
, in fedora 43, fedora 44, nixpkgs unstable

💖 lessecho(1) — the Lil Echo Buddy That Escapes Your Metachars 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the manual page for lessecho, living in the General Commands Manual section of your friendly neighbourhood man pages 🎀 she's tiny, she's niche, she's a little gremlin who does exactly one job and does it flawlessly, and honestly? iconic.

✨ NAME ✨

lessecho — expand metacharacters 🦋

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

lessecho [-a] [-ox] [-cx] [-pn] [-dn] [-mx] [-nn] [-ex] file ...

lessecho --version

💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

so what does this girl actually do? okay so lessecho is a program that simply echos its arguments on standard output. that's it. that's the whole vibe ✨

BUT — and this is the plot twist, the main character moment, the *the way that*— any metacharacter in the output gets an "escape" character slapped in front of it first. and by default that escape char is a backslash 🩷

big important note though, bestie: lessecho is invoked internally by less, and it is NOT intended to be used directly by humans. no cap. she's a backstage queen, not a meet-and-greet girlie. if you're a human reading this thinking "omg I'll just run her in my terminal,"… sure, nobody's stopping you, but that's not who she's for 🙈

👑 OPTIONS 👑

here's the full rundown, bestie, every single one, no skips, no cuts, we keep it thorough fr fr:

  • -ex — specifies x, rather than backslash, to be the escape char for metachars. and plot twist: if x is -, then no escape char is used at all, and arguments that contain metachars get surrounded by quotes instead 🎀
  • -ox — specifies x, rather than double-quote, to be the open quote character, which is used if the -e- option is specified.
  • -cx — specifies x to be the close quote character.
  • -pn — specifies n to be the open quote character, but as an integer 🔢
  • -dn — specifies n to be the close quote character, also as an integer 🔢
  • -mx — specifies x to be a metachar. heads up though: by default, no characters are considered metachars. so if you want metachars, you gotta say so 💀
  • -nn — specifies n to be a metachar, as an integer 🔢
  • -fn — specifies n to be the escape char for metachars, as an integer 🔢
  • -a — specifies that all arguments are to be quoted. the default is that only arguments containing metacharacters are quoted 🌈

🫶 SEE ALSO 🫶

  • less(1) — yeah, her big sister, the whole reason she exists 💜

🌟 AUTHOR 🌟

this manual page was written by Thomas Schoepf, for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used by others) 🎀 slay, thank you Thomas, we appreciate you.

report bugs at https://github.com/gwsw/less/issues — go be a good citizen and file that bug, bestie, the devs are literally waiting to hear from you 🐛💖

psst — reminder that she's an internal helper for less. she's not built for you to hang out with directly. respect the lore 🙈

and that's the whole page! 💫 this was less 710, dated 08 Sep 2026 — so like, remember this exact version and date when you cite her, periodt 👑✨ bye bestie, go read something in less and know she's back there doing her lil escape thing for you the entire time 🦋💅

📦 where this page comes from