Less Interpretation

Some distributions (e.g. some versions of gentoo) foolishly default to configuring less so that it runs various known formats through an interpreter before displaying. For example, if you less a Postscript file, you'll get some bizarre ASCII version of the output from Ghostscript rather than the actual Postscript contents of the file. Something similar happens to HTML files. This is really stupid, and I can't imagine its the behavior more than 0.01% of the population expect and desire from less.

How this interpretation is done is controlled by the LESSOPEN environment variable. Unset it to get rid of this behavior. On a run-by-run basis, you can pass the -L command line option to supress it.