Subject: bug#62958: [PATCH] Set PAGER=cat in comint.el

From: Gregory Heytings <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 May 2023 22:21:19 +0000

>>> I will definitely customize the new option 'comint-pager' to "cat" as 
>>> soon as it arrives to master.  But for such cases when some commands 
>>> produce too long output, would it be also possible to provide an 
>>> additional option to set the number of lines to output before 
>>> stopping?
>>
>> Did you try "cat | head -N"?
>
> Now I tried out, and it works as expected.  Only there is no indication 
> that the output is truncated.  But probably such indication is not 
> important with overly long output.
>

If you want such an indication, I suggest using sed instead of head:

cat | sed -e "<N>aOUTPUT TRUNCATED" -e "<N>q"

(Of course, replace <N> with the number of lines of output you want.  And 
of course you can replace the string "OUTPUT TRUNCATED" with whatever you 
want.)