LESSECHO(1) General Commands Manual LESSECHO(1)

# [NAME](#NAME)

lessecho - expand metacharacters

# [SYNOPSIS](#SYNOPSIS)

**lessecho** \[**-a**] \[**-ox**] \[**-cx**] \[**-pn**] \[**-dn**] \[**-mx**] \[**-nn**] \[**-ex**] *file* ...

**lessecho --version**

# [DESCRIPTION](#DESCRIPTION)

**lessecho** is a program that simply echos its arguments on standard output. But any metacharacter in the output is preceded by an "escape" character, which by default is a backslash. **lessecho** is invoked internally by **less**, and is not intended to be used directly by humans.

# [OPTIONS](#OPTIONS)

A summary of options is included below.

[**-e*x***](#e)

Specifies "*x*", rather than backslash, to be the escape char for metachars. If *x* is "-", no escape char is used and arguments containing metachars are surrounded by quotes instead.

[**-o*x***](#o)

Specifies "*x*", rather than double-quote, to be the open quote character, which is used if the -e- option is specified.

[**-c*x***](#c)

Specifies "*x*" to be the close quote character.

[**-p*n***](#p)

Specifies "*n*" to be the open quote character, as an integer.

[**-d*n***](#d)

Specifies "*n*" to be the close quote character, as an integer.

[**-m*x***](#m)

Specifies "*x*" to be a metachar. By default, no characters are considered metachars.

[**-n*n***](#n)

Specifies "*n*" to be a metachar, as an integer.

[**-f*n***](#f)

Specifies "*n*" to be the escape char for metachars, as an integer.

[**-a**](#a)

Specifies that all arguments are to be quoted. The default is that only arguments containing metacharacters are quoted.

# [SEE ALSO](#SEE_ALSO)

[**less**(1)](/man/os/less/less.1)

# [AUTHOR](#AUTHOR)

This manual page was written by [Thomas Schoepf](mailto:schoepf@debian.org), for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used by others).

Report bugs at [https://github.com/gwsw/less/issues](https://github.com/gwsw/less/issues).

11 Oct 2026 less 711

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Document: lessecho(1) from less 711-r0 (Chainguard OS)
Source: https://github.com/gwsw/less