How to turn off the pager for AWS CLI return value?

Question

I am attempting to utilize the AWS CLI along with a for loop in bash to iteratively purge multiple SQS message queues. The bash script works almost as intended, the problem I am having is with the return value each time the AWS CLI sends a request. When the request is successful, it returns an empty value and opens up an interactive pager in the command line. I then have to manually type q to exit the interactive screen and allow the for loop to continue to the next iteration. This becomes very tedious and time consuming when attempting to purge a large number of queues.

Is there a way to configure AWS CLI to disable this interactive pager from popping up for every return value? Or a way to pipe the return values into a separate file instead of being displayed?

I have played around with configuring different return value types (text, yaml, JSON) but haven't had any luck. Also the --no-pagination parameter doesn't change the behavior.

Here's an example of the bash script I'm trying to run:

for x in 1 2 3; do    aws sqs purge-queue --queue-url https://sqs.<aws-region>.amazonaws.com/<id>/<env>-$x-<queueName>.fifo;  done 

Answer 1

Just running into this issue myself, I was able to disable the behaviour by invoking the aws cli as AWS_PAGER="" aws ....

Alternatively you could simply export AWS_PAGER="" at the top of your (bash) script.

Source: https://github.com/aws/aws-cli/pull/4702#issue-344978525

Answer 2

You can disable pager either by exporting AWS_PAGER="" or by modifying you AWS cli config file.

export AWS_PAGER=""   ### or update your ~/.aws/config with   [default] cli_pager= 

Alternatively, you can enable the default pager to output of less program as

export AWS_PAGER="less"  

or corresponding config change.

Ref: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-usage-pagination.html#cli-usage-pagination-clientside