is it possible to open files in subdirectories with less?

Question

I sometimes use less to quickly page through a small collection of files using something like

less brscan/*/*

and then I use :n to cycle through the files

If I have a folder/s e.g.

brscan/
├── DEBIAN
│   ├── conffiles
│   ├── control
│   ├── postinst
│   ├── postrm
│   └── prerm
├── etc
│   └── opt
├── opt
│   └── brother
└── usr
    ├── bin
    └── lib64

in this example less will pick up the files in folder DEBIAN

DEBIAN
       ├── conffiles
       ├── control
       ├── postinst
       ├── postrm
       └── prerm

but it wont descend into other subdirectories, it just errors:

brscan/etc is a directory
brscan/opt is a directory
brscan/usr is a directory

is it possible to get less to page the files in these subdirectories?

Im thinking something like

find brscan/ | xargs less

but its not working - still picking up directories

Answer 1

specify -not -type d to omit directories from the find result

find -not -type d | xargs less

or better:

find -not -type d -print0 | xargs -0 less

which handles filenames with spaces in them better.

Answer 2

With bash, globstar option enable, you can:

shopt -s globstar
less brscan/**/*

But it also includes directories. With zsh, you can filter expansion to regular files only:

less brscan/**/*(.)

All of the above will fail if too many files return. The safe way is using find:

find brscan -type f -exec less {} +