It seems that you have some old less package installed. We don't have less-436 in any openSUSE product: | Product | Version | |-------------------|----------| | openSUSE:Factory | less-458 | | openSUSE:13.1 | less-458 | | openSUSE:13.2 | less-458 | However I'm not able to reproduce it on my testing host with openSUSE:13.2: $ less -p 00020005.00000000000000000000ffff7f0000010000c2fb55d7a7190000867e31.00000000000000000000ffff7f0000010000c2fb55d7a7190000867f0000000000000000 /dev/null /dev/null is not a regular file (use -f to see it) Moreover according to the changelog [1] it seems that this issue should be fixed since less-443: "Version 443 was released on 9 Apr 2011. ... Fix "ungetc overflow" when passing long commands via the -p option." So please install the latest less package and let me know if it's ok for you. Thank you. [1] http://www.greenwoodsoftware.com/less/news.443.html