One of the lesser known less features is filtering only matching lines using &pattern. This is also very cool in combination with F, ie. tail -f mode. Unfortunately it tends to be extremely slow in large files, even though grep seemingly has no problem with them. I suspect it's related to search performance.
Overall I think less is one of those tools where it's really valuable to spend 10 minutes a day in the man page for a week, which should be enough to learn essentially all of its functionality.
Markers are also very useful, particularly paired with the functionality to pipe data to another file or shell command. E.g. to extract the instance of a server error plus some lines for context from an otherwise unwieldy log file. :) I use markers rarely enough that I invariable need to reread the man-/help-page, but being aware of the functionality is half the battle. :)
Another tip: within less, press -S to toggle line wrap. (Works for most other command line options, too.)
> Markers are also very useful, particularly paired with the functionality to pipe data to another file or shell command. E.g. to extract the instance of a server error plus some lines for context from an otherwise unwieldy log file. :) I use markers rarely enough that I invariable need to reread the man-/help-page, but being aware of the functionality is half the battle. :)
Overall I think less is one of those tools where it's really valuable to spend 10 minutes a day in the man page for a week, which should be enough to learn essentially all of its functionality.
Markers are also very useful, particularly paired with the functionality to pipe data to another file or shell command. E.g. to extract the instance of a server error plus some lines for context from an otherwise unwieldy log file. :) I use markers rarely enough that I invariable need to reread the man-/help-page, but being aware of the functionality is half the battle. :)
Another tip: within less, press -S to toggle line wrap. (Works for most other command line options, too.)