more - as well as pg - act both as text filters. Both are intended to be fed pure text streams and everything else (that includes termcap sequences or ANSI sequences) is not guaranteed to work at all.

That was the short answer. The same effect, for example you will see when feeding a non-english text with umlauts or other diacritical extravaganza to "more" and/or "pg". Some - more by chance than intendedly so - works, most do not.

The reason for your problem is that the colours in "ls" come from injections of terminal steering sequences into the stream of characters and whitespace. Here is the principle:

Code:

without LS_COLOURS
# ls -lrt
total 128
54198505 drwxr-xr-x  3 user user  4096 Jan  6 18:06 .
54165666 drwxr-xr-x 17 user user  4096 Jan  6 18:06 ..
54198511 -rw-------  1 user user  1066 Jan  6 18:06 file1
54198519 -rw-------  1 user user 21451 Jan  6 18:06 file2
54198519 drw-------  1 user user 21451 Jan  6 18:07 dir1

with LS_COLOURS
# ls -lrt
total 128
54198505 drwxr-xr-x  3 user user  4096 Jan  6 18:06 <ESC-Seq>.<ESC-Seq>
54165666 drwxr-xr-x 17 user user  4096 Jan  6 18:06 <ESC-Seq>..<ESC-Seq>
54198511 -rw-------  1 user user  1066 Jan  6 18:06 <ESC-Seq>file1<ESC-Seq>
54198519 -rw-------  1 user user 21451 Jan  6 18:06 <ESC-Seq>file2<ESC-Seq>
54198519 drw-------  1 user user 21451 Jan  6 18:07 <ESC-Seq>dir1<ESC-Seq>

These ESC-Sequences set the terminal to display the characters in different colours or reset this mode back to normal. Read a man page of termcap and search for "standout modes" if you want to know more.

There are two possible explanations for your problem: the first one is, that "ls" behaves differently if writing to a terminal or a pipeline. For instance, if you issue "ls" (without parameter) the output will be in several columns. If you issue "ls | pg" you will notice that it is formatted not in several but only one column. "ls" is designed that way because it makes writing scripts easier (if you have to split the columns back to single files first it would be more complicated to cycle through files in a loop), see "man ls" for details on this. Maybe it is the same with the colours and they are suppressed if ls notices that it is run in a pipeline to not interfere with scripting.

The other possible explanation is, that more eats away on the ESC-sequences because it doesn't know hoe to deal with them for reasons described above. Try using "less" as a "more"-replacement in this case, because i suppose it will - coming from the same source, so to say - be able to deal with the formatting sequences better.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

PS for Padov: "more" can scroll forward and backwards too, at least in its AIX version: use the navigating keys known from vi, like:

"k" = line up
"j" = line down

etc.