less with LESS="-r" in /etc/env.d/70less made me b

[esprout]

less was paging my text files that contained lines longer than 80 characters funny and I couldn't figure out why.

After many days and hours of head banging, I finally figured out it's it is because of the /etc/env.d/70less added on Dec 26, 2002 for groff-1.18 and later support. (I should have read the ChangeLog a couple weeks ago, might have saved me a lot of frustration...grrrr).

So now I put "LESS=-R" in my .profile so I am no longer driven nuts by the nutty paging behavior from less. -R seems to behave much better.

Now the question is, what exactly does the -r flag for less do for groff? And when exactly is this used? Is it when viewing man pages or something? Can the flag in /etc/env.d/70less be replaced with -R instead of -r? -r in my opinion makes less much less useful than it usually is.

For those who haven't encountered it, less -r garbles text files when they have lines longer than 80 characters (such potentially your USE line in make.conf). Funny things happen like lines are missing as you page up and down the file. A screen refresh (^L) still leaves missing lines. The -R flag (which I assume tries to do the same thing as -r) does a much better job of not garbling lines.