less goto line requires me to type ':' twice

Here is the behaviour im seeing:

A short description is that when i type man bash | less, i need to type

::100

instead of

:100

in order to move to line 100.

I've tried googling it but couldnt really come up with sane search terms and it yielded nothihng.

Any ideas ?

My version of less is:

less 487 (POSIX regular expressions)

1 Answer

_{Just to be clear: G means press this key and g means enter this character, so G = Shift+G.}

To navigate to a specific line in less, just enter a line number and press G. You don't enter the colon :, e.g. 1+0+0+G to go to line 100.

Entering the same, but pressing Enter instead of G jumps down 100 lines instead. Here are the jumping commands from less --help:

Commands marked with * may be preceded by a number, N. g < ESC-< * Go to first line in file (or line N). G > ESC-> * Go to last line in file (or line N). p % * Go to beginning of file (or N percent into file).

Here's a list of possible combinations (for a standard US QWERTY keyboard where <=Shift+,, >=Shift+. and %=Shift+5):

• jump to the first line:
  • G or
  • Shift+, or
  • Esc+Shift+, or
  • P or
  • Shift+5
• jump to line 8:
  • 8+G or
  • 8+Shift+, or
  • 8+Esc+Shift+, or
  • 8+Shift+G or
  • 8+Shift+. or
  • 8+Esc+Shift+.
• jump 8 lines down:
  • 8+Enter
• jump to 8% of the file:
  • 8+P or
  • 8+Shift+5
• jump to the last line:
  • Shift+G or
  • Shift+. or
  • Esc+Shift+.