lessecho(1) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | SEE ALSO | AUTHOR | COLOPHON

LESSECHO(1)              General Commands Manual              LESSECHO(1)

NAME         top

       lessecho - expand metacharacters

SYNOPSIS         top

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

DESCRIPTION         top

       lessecho is a program that simply echos its arguments on standard
       output.  But any metacharacter in the output is preceded by an
       "escape" character, which by default is a backslash.  lessecho is
       invoked internally by less, and is not intended to be used
       directly by humans.

OPTIONS         top

       A summary of options is included below.

       -ex    Specifies "x", rather than backslash, to be the escape char
              for metachars.  If x is "-", no escape char is used and
              arguments containing metachars are 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, as an
              integer.

       -dn    Specifies "n" to be the close quote character, as an
              integer.

       -mx    Specifies "x" to be a metachar.  By default, no characters
              are considered metachars.

       -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         top

       less(1)

AUTHOR         top

       This manual page was written by Thomas Schoepf
       <schoepf@debian.org>, for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be
       used by others).

       Report bugs at https://github.com/gwsw/less/issues.

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the less (A file pager) project.  Information
       about the project can be found at 
       ⟨http://www.greenwoodsoftware.com/less/⟩.  If you have a bug report
       for this manual page, see
       ⟨http://www.greenwoodsoftware.com/less/faq.html#bugs⟩.  This page
       was obtained from the tarball less-668.tar.gz fetched from
       ⟨http://www.greenwoodsoftware.com/less/download.html⟩ on
       2025-02-02.  If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML
       version of the page, or you believe there is a better or more up-
       to-date source for the page, or you have corrections or
       improvements to the information in this COLOPHON (which is not
       part of the original manual page), send a mail to
       man-pages@man7.org

                         Version 668: 06 Oct 2024             LESSECHO(1)

Pages that refer to this page: less(1)