It is not uncommon for an AWS CLI command to return a ton of output. When that
happens, it is nice that the results end up in pager program (like less
)
where you can search and review them, copy a value of interest, and then exit.
The pager prevents that wall of output from cluttering your terminal history.
However, sometimes I am running a command that I know is going to return a small result. I'd rather have the results go to stdout where I can see them in the terminal history rather than to an ephemeral pager.
For that situation I can tack on the --no-cli-pager
flag.
$ aws rds describe-db-instances \
--query 'DBInstances[*].EngineVersion' \
--output json \
--no-cli-pager
[
"13.15",
"16.8"
]
Here I've asked the AWS CLI to tell me the engine versions of all my RDS
Postgres databases. Because I know the results are only going to include a
couple results for my couple of DBs, I'd like to skip the pager —
--no-cli-pager
.
Though I think it is better to do this on a case by case basis, it is also possible to turn off the pager via the CLI configuration file.
$ aws configure set cli_pager ""