MLESS(1)

📦 version 1.1, in debian bookworm, debian trixie, ubuntu jammy, ubuntu noble, ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

💖 MLESS(1) 💖

okay bestie, welcome to mless — the glow-up command from the General Commands Manual that lets you conveniently read messages in less(1). yes, literally. it's giving "I just want to scroll my mail in peace" and honestly? iconic. 🎀

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

mless [msg]

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so here's the tea 🍓: mless runs less(1) on the output of mshow(1) for the current sequence. the display starts at the current message, or at msg if you passed one. (and if you're wondering what the heck a msg argument even looks like, go check mmsg(7) for the message argument syntax — it's all there, iykyk.)

and now the part that's genuinely kind of genius, no cap: when you pass no messages and the standard input is coming from a pipe, mless calls mseq -S to set the current sequence, and then runs itself on the resulting sequence. the first "file" of the less instance will be the output of mscan(1). which means mless is the move to slap at the end of a pipeline. periodt. 🔥

mless will start less(1) and display the current message, if possible. to read the next message use :n, and to read the previous one use :p. that's it, that's the whole navigation arc, go off. 👑

💀 EXIT STATUS 💀

the mless utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs. simple as. if it's not 0, something said "not today" and you should probably look into that. 😭

👀 SEE ALSO 👀

🫶 AUTHORS 🫶

  • Leah Neukirchen <leah@vuxu.org>

👑 LICENSE 👑

mless is in the public domain. ✨

to the extent possible under law, the creator of this work has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.

http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

and that's a wrap, bestie 💅 this page came to you from the Debian crew, dated July 22, 2016 — old enough to be vintage, still serving flawless mless(1) energy. mwah. 💜

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