[illumos-Developer] more & less

[Ben Taylor]

On Sun, 2010-12-05 at 12:22 -1000, Samuel Younge wrote:

>> The only bizarre 'more' dependency in illumos that I am aware of is
>> that 'less' does not work by default after transitioning to single
>> user mode.
>> This is strange as both 'more' and 'less' exist in the /usr/bin PATH.
>> I am not sure what that is about, I have not taking the time to
>> investigate, but illumos does need a functional pager for single user
>> mode.
>> That is a minor issue though, I suspect.
>
>That's a strange one.  less shouldn't have any external dependencies, so
> I don't know why it wouldn't work in single user mode.  Can you describe
>what actually happens when you try to use it.
>
>I'd guess that resolving any problem here would be a requirement for
>making less a replacement for either /bin/more or xpg4/bin/more.
>
>	- Garrett

I remember having a discussion with Jürgen Keil  a couple of years back
on this exact issue, as I had put less into my mini-root when I was
debugging some problematic Solaris 10 installs.

Jürgen said the issue was that stderr was not correctly set for single user
mode, and required to exec the shell with appropriate redirection.  I'll see
if I can find it in my archives.

Ben