Piping program output to less does not display beginning of the output

Question

I am trying to make a bunch of files in my directory, but the files are generating ~200 lines of errors, so they fly past my terminal screen too quickly and I have to scroll up to read them.

I'd like to pipe the output that displays on the screen to a pager that will let me read the errors starting at the beginning. But when I try

make | less

less does not display the beginning of the output - it displays the end of the output that's usually piped to the screen, and then tells me the output is 1 line long. When I try typing Gg, the only line on the screen is the line of the makefile that executed, and the regular screen output disappears.

Am I using less incorrectly? I haven't really ever used it before, and I'm having similar problems with something like, sh myscript.sh | less where it doesn't immediately display the beginning of the output file.

Answer 1

The errors from make appear on the standard error stream (stderr in C), which is not redirected by normal pipes. If you want to have it redirected to less as well, you need either make |& less (csh, etc.) or make 2>&1 | less (sh, bash, etc.).