[CLUE-Tech] trouble with less as user root

[Chris Tubutis]

On 23 Aug, Jason S. Friedman wrote:
> A bizarre problem.

And a confusing description...

> The 'less' program works for the following:
> non-root user on machine A   <--------+
>     root user on machine B            |
> non-root user on machine A   <--------+

Saying the same thing twice there? Are you trying to say both root &
non-root on Machine A and root only on Machine B? I'm assuming
non-root on Machine B is OK? Regardless...


> The root user on machine B, when using less, sees text fly past, hears
> a beep, and gets a prompt back.

This is sounding so much to me like a GUI/desktop/xterm or similar
problem. Is everybody running the exact same environment (assuming some
sort of GUI desktop environment)? What happens when you run all these
users without any X environments, just the traditional black & white
text-mode screen (RedHat's runlevel 2 or 3 , I think it's runlevel
5 that gets users directly into pretty GUI stuff upon system
initialization), is the less behavior the same? What's different in the
users' .bashrc/.cshrc/.profile/.kshrc/etc. setups? I really doubt
there's a problem with less but instead there's a problem with the X
environment and/or xterm (or kterm or whatever) that is manifesting
itself via less.

ct