How to avoid the "pager" in mailx?

There are two major problems that prevent an easy solution for the problem:

1. As indicated in the mailx man page (SLES ships Nail’s mailx), “Variables in the environment passed to mailx cannot be unset.”

2. PAGER (as set from within mailx) cannot have parameters, so something like set PAGER="LESS=-F less" or set PAGER="sh -c LESS=-F less" do not work. To make things worse, there is no output if you try something like set PAGER="less -F".

So the alternatives are:

1. mailx can be configured to skip the pager if a message fits in a single screen by setting the crt option (that requires the number of lines of the terminal normally): add

   set crt 

   to your .mailrc. Without a value, the version of mailx available in SLES uses the current screen height; POSIX doesn’t specify the behaviour when crt is set without a value, so a POSIX-compliant approach is either to set it to 99999 (to always skip the pager) or a typical value for your work environment (to only use the pager when necessary).

2. The pager can also be replaced with a non-paging display tool, e.g. cat when starting mailx from a Bourne-shell-like interpreter:

   PAGER=cat mailx 

3. If your pager is less, you can ask it to quit without prompting if it has less than a screen’s worth of text to display, using its -F option (again using sh syntax):

   LESS=F mailx 

   If you want to combine -F with other options set in your LESS variable, use

   LESS="$LESS -F" mailx 

   This can be enabled in general by exporting LESS=F (and any other less option you want to enable by default) in your shell startup script.

   In versions of less older than 530, you may need to combine -F and -X (LESS=FX).