[4mLESSECHO[24m(1)                 General Commands Manual                [4mLESSECHO[24m(1)

[1mNAME[0m
       lessecho - expand metacharacters

[1mSYNOPSIS[0m
       [1mlessecho [4m[22m[‐ox][24m [4m[‐cx][24m [4m[‐pn][24m [4m[‐dn][24m [4m[‐mx][24m [4m[‐nn][24m [4m[‐ex][24m [4m[‐a][24m [4mfile[24m [4m...[0m

[1mDESCRIPTION[0m
       [1mlessecho  [22mis a program that simply echos its arguments on standard out‐
       put.  But any metacharacter in the output is preceded  by  an  "escape"
       character, which by default is a backslash.  [1mlessecho [22mis invoked inter‐
       nally by [1mless[22m, and is not intended to be used directly by humans.

[1mOPTIONS[0m
       A summary of options is included below.

       [1m-e[4m[22mx[24m    Specifies  "[4mx[24m", rather than backslash, to be the escape char for
              metachars.  If [4mx[24m is "‐", no escape char is  used  and  arguments
              containing metachars are surrounded by quotes instead.

       [1m-o[4m[22mx[24m    Specifies  "[4mx[24m",  rather  than double‐quote, to be the open quote
              character, which is used if the -e‐ option is specified.

       [1m-c[4m[22mx[24m    Specifies "[4mx[24m" to be the close quote character.

       [1m-p[4m[22mn[24m    Specifies "[4mn[24m" to be the open quote character, as an integer.

       [1m-d[4m[22mn[24m    Specifies "[4mn[24m" to be the close quote character, as an integer.

       [1m-m[4m[22mx[24m    Specifies "[4mx[24m" to be a metachar.  By default, no  characters  are
              considered metachars.

       [1m-n[4m[22mn[24m    Specifies "[4mn[24m" to be a metachar, as an integer.

       [1m-f[4m[22mn[24m    Specifies  "[4mn[24m"  to be the escape char for metachars, as an inte‐
              ger.

       [1m-a     [22mSpecifies that all arguments are to be quoted.  The  default  is
              that only arguments containing metacharacters are quoted.

[1mSEE ALSO[0m
       [1mless[22m(1)

[1mAUTHOR[0m
       This  manual  page  was written by Thomas Schoepf <schoepf@debian.org>,
       for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used by others).

       Report bugs at https://github.com/gwsw/less/issues.

                           Version 685: 04 Oct 2025                [4mLESSECHO[24m(1)
