Can't use bat at all! (Error: Use of bat as a pager is disallowed...)

[cansurmeli]

What version of bat are you using?
bat 0.17.1

Describe the bug you encountered:

Whenever I use bat, I'm shown the following error message:

[bat error]: Use of bat as a pager is disallowed in order to avoid infinite recursion problems

I believe this started happening after a certain update but can't exactly pinpoint which one. I've uninstalled and reinstalled bat again but with no luck.

What did you expect to happen instead?
For bat to display the contents as usual.

How did you install bat?
Homebrew

---

system

$ uname -srm
Darwin 20.1.0 x86_64

$ sw_vers
ProductName: macOS
ProductVersion: 11.0.1
BuildVersion: 20B29

bat

$ bat --version
bat 0.17.1

$ env
PAGER=bat

bat_config

bat_wrapper

No wrapper script for 'bat'.

bat_wrapper_function

No wrapper function for 'bat'.

No wrapper function for 'cat'.

tool

$ less --version
less 487 (POSIX regular expressions)

[sudo-nice]

That's intentional, see #1343
Personally, I don't like this restriction too (but it's not hard to overcome).

[sharkdp]

That's intentional, see #1343

Hm. Kind of, but not to the extent documented here, actually. What we really want to avoid is infinite recursion (bat calls bat as pager, which calls bat as pager, …). See #1334.

What I didn't foresee is that users want to set PAGER=bat to use bat as a pager in other contexts.

So what we probably should do instead:

• Allow PAGER=bat, but ignore the setting in bat and simply default to less. Unless of course, BAT_PAGER or --pager is used to overwrite the value of PAGER.
• Disallow the usage of bat within BAT_PAGER and --pager.

[Enselic]

@cansurmeli Before the fix is out, as a workaround, you can pass --paging=never to bat.

I.e. this fails in 0.17.1:
PAGER=bat bat file.txt

But this works:
PAGER=bat bat --paging=never file.txt

[sharkdp]

Another workaround would be to use --pager="less -FRX". You can also add that line to the bats config file.

[Enselic]

@sharkdp Did you see my PR with PagerSource? Seems to me as if that approach could be useful to implement the new behavior you propose here.

[cansurmeli]

Ok, I get the picture now. I saw #1343 & #1334 before but didn't quite understand the situation.

In the meantime, --paging=never suffices as a workaround. Thanks for all the suggestions.

[Enselic]

I will happily fix this bug once #1402 is merged, because it should be very simple, assuming the current refactoring proposal in that PR survives code review.

[sharkdp]

Bugfix released in bat v0.18.