How to search git log (using less) for word boundaries

Question

A common workflow for me is to type git log -p then search using / for text to find changes in the history. I'm on OSX, using the default pager:

$ git config --global core.pager
# no output (meaning default pager, less)

When I search, flavors of regexes work, like a.+b, however, I can't seem to make word boundaries work. I've tried all of the following:

<word>
\<word\>
\bword\b
\v<word>

The last one is attemping to mimic Vim's very magic switch, which I don't know if it exists in less but it doesn't error. None of these searches return matches.

I've tried turning off color with git config --global color.ui false (default value auto) but this doesn't seem to have any effect.

This question makes it sound like \< should work? But it doesn't.

My less version:

$ less --version
    less 418
    Copyright (C) 1984-2007 Mark Nudelman

Answer 1

According to the less website FAQ (http://www.greenwoodsoftware.com/less/faq.html) less will either use the operating system regular expressions provided by libc, or will use its own built-in library if requested during build.

My less version is 458. The \< and \> operators work perfectly.

Your options include :-

1. Check (and possibly update) your libc version. (Mine is libc6-2.19)
2. Build your own less using more recent libraries or configured to use its internal regular expression handler.

For completeness, Ubuntu 12.04 includes the following versions:

• less 444
• libc6-2.15

and the regular expressions work as expected.