less viewer: Copy all the lines to clipboard

Question

There has already been a post in stackoverflow for VI editor for copying all the text into the clipboard. (Copy all the lines to clipboard) I want to do the same thing with the less viewer. I tried to search online for the process called "yank" and I did not find anything for it.

How do I copy all lines in the less editor into the clip board.

And I cannot close less and reopen it in vi. It is because of the fact that I have managed to load this file into the editor and while I have loaded it, the file has already been moved in the back end. It is a long story. The easiest solution for me now is to copy the contents of the file into memory.

Answer 1

less doesn't have a clipboard, but you may be able to get it to output what's stored in its buffers to a new file. This will only work if the entire contents of the file are buffered:

1. Type g to go to the top of the file
2. Type | (that's a pipe character, not an L or I) to indicate that you want to output to a pipe
3. Type $ to indicate that you want the output content to go to the end of the file
4. Type dd of=/path/to/new/file and press Enter

The dd command will take the piped data and save it to the file passed to the of= argument.