Bash always outputs to less, how can I turn this off?

Question

After a recent update bash seems to always output to less, which is resulting in pagination for many commands. Does anyone know how to turn less off?

Example output for systemctl status

Answer 1

The man page for systemctl (man systemctl) explains this behaviour clearly, and even offers options to change it:

$SYSTEMD_PAGER Pager to use when --no-pager is not given; overrides $PAGER. If neither $SYSTEMD_PAGER nor $PAGER are set, a set of well-known pager implementations are tried in turn, including less(1) and more(1), until one is found. If no pager implementation is discovered no pager is invoked. Setting this environment variable to an empty string or the value "cat" is equivalent to passing --no-pager.

So in your case the solution is to set the environment variable when you log in:

export SYSTEMD_PAGER=cat

Answer 2

More widely, you can define PAGER environment in your bash runtime config

# In .bashrc or .bash_profile

export PAGER='cat'