How can I make Unix Less wrap long columns?

Question

I need to view a large tab delimited file using less. There is a column with ~200 characters which I am not interested in seeing but that column pushes all other columns to right making the viewing hard. Is there a way to prevent less from showing more than the tab width in a column?

Answer 1

You can use 'cut' to delete that column and redirect the output to less.

For eg if its the first column that you don't want to see

cut -f 1 --complement $FILENAME | less

If you have a delimiter other than tab, you can specify that using '-d;

cut -d ',' -f 1 --complement $FILENAME | less

Answer 2

Using

less -S

does the trick. See also the answers here