Command for reloading file from disk to show changes when using “less?”

There are two possibly relevant commands detailed in the fine manual for less(1)

   R      Repaint the screen, discarding any buffered  input.   Useful  if
          the file is changing while it is being viewed.

   F      Scroll  forward, and keep trying to read when the end of file is
          reached.  Normally this command would be used  when  already  at
          the  end of the file.  It is a way to monitor the tail of a file
          which is growing while it is being  viewed.   (The  behavior  is
          similar to the "tail -f" command.)

R for repaint does not always reload the file.^[1]

A workaround that always reloads the file is to press hq, which will open the Help page, then quit. It has a side effect of forcing the file to reload.

[1] Here are some examples of situations that R do and do not reload:

• > and >> changes: DO get reloaded
• sed -i, gEdit, TextEdit: DO NOT get reloaded
• On Linux, vi changes: DO get reloaded
• On Mac, vi changes: DO NOT get reloaded

I believe the difference comes down to whether the inode changes (you can check with ls -i foo.txt). If the inode changes, then R will not work.

I worked around this problem using a shell script that auto-reloads less on exit:

while true; do less -K file.txt || exit; done

With this script, I can hit q to reload the file, and CTRL+C to exit back to the bash shell. The CTRL+C behavior is enabled via the -K option. Your last search term will be preserved.

This can be further refactored by using the colon (:) to create an empty expression, via do : ...

while less -K file.txt; do : ; done

Drawbacks

The current viewing position will always be rest to line 0.

Practical Example using mintty

In my windows (GitBash) environment I set up a script that opens a new terminal window (mintty) for less-viewing a file:

lesswin() { mintty bash -c "while less -K \"$@\"; do : ; done;" & }