From help-octave-request  Tue Oct  5 11:51:27 1993
Subject: Re: Sun precompiled version invokes 'less' 
From: John Eaton <jwe>
To: josepf at porthos dot bio dot ub dot es (Josep Fortiana)
Cc: help-octave
Date: Tue, 05 Oct 93 11:51:20 EDT

:   It seems that the precompiled SunOS version of octave
:   invokes the program  'less' for the help function. 
:   Is there a way to change this behavior, by using an
:   environment variable?

Octave uses the following variables in order until it finds one that
is not empty:

  * The builtin variable PAGER
  * The environment variable PAGER
  * The compiled in default pager

It will also work for PAGER to specify a pipeline of commands.

Octave uses less as the default because it can page backward when
reading from a pipe.  I find this to be very useful, and something
that most versions of more cannot do.

jwe