Sending Perl formatted output to less

Question

I have defined a format like this:

# header format
format STDOUT_TOP = 
pid    ppid   start_addr   uid   gid   state     vsz   rss     name 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
.

# data format
format STDOUT = 
@>>>  @>>>   @>>>>>>>>>>  @>>>  @>>>  @>>>    @>>>>>  @>>>  @<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
$pid, $ppid, $h_next,     $uid, $gid, $state, $vm,    $rss, $name
.

When I call write everything works great when I am printing to STDOUT, but I am processing a lot of data and it takes more than page to display; the ideal way for me or someone else to examine it would be with less. When I pipe the output of my program to less, a ^L character gets printed before the header at every new page of output.

screenshot:

Is there some way around this? Because if that character is printed then my header is misaligned with my data.

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

That's an ASCII formfeed. It's probably being printed in both cases, but less is actually displaying it. According to perlform and perlvar, perl is outputting the contents of $^L (or $FORMAT_FORMFEED under use English). Try setting that var to the empty string or a newline.