I recently switched from Ubuntu 15.04 to 15.10 and although they seem to have the same version of less, 458, I get different behavior. In my new system, if a file has fewer lines than the terminal then less shows it in the bottom of the terminal window, like this:                          <-                          <- empty space, not part of file                          <-file starts here  ...last line of the file(END) <- symbol inserted by LESSIn my experience with other systems I would get the following behavior instead:file starts here  ...last line of the file(END) <- symbol inserted by LESS                          <-                          <- empty space                          <-This is a minor issue but nonetheless important. The problem with the new behavior is that I can't tell from the output whether the file actually starts with empty lines or it's just the way less outputs it because it's too short for the terminal window.
How to configure `less` to print starting from the top of terminal window?
less
The -c option will force less to start from the top of the screen. You can apply it by default by adding it to the LESS environment variable:LESS=${LESS:+$LESS }-cexport LESSThis will take whatever is currently in LESS, if anything, and add -c to it, with a space if necessary.