less follow mode - clear screen

Question

I use less follow mode (Shift-F) to follow a log as it is updated. Sometimes it would be useful to do some actions on my system, and then only see log output related to that action. Basically I would need some way to clear the buffer so I'm not distracted by old stuff.

I can't find anything about it on the man page, but maybe there is some trick?

Answer 1

I doubt less has such an option.

What you're doing is very similar to what tail -f achieves, only with convenient scrollback. What you can do is quit current less and re-launch it with

     tail -f logfile -n lines_back | less

that way your buffer will contain only lines_back lines of the log (and should grow just the same).

Answer 2

less +F somelogfile

Any option in the COMMANDS section of the less man page can be prepended with +. For instance, this command finds the appropriate section in the manual:

man less | less +/COMMANDS

Answer 3

Use Ctrl-L to clear the terminal (on Windows/SuperPuTTY, different on Linux).

Then:

tail -n0 -f x.log

This displays a blank screen, and any new log lines will get added to the screen.

This is not less, but one can always run it under a different tab to retain the full power of scrollback and searching.