$ seq 1 100 >seq.txt $ less -M seq.txt Status line says: "seq.txt lines 1-23/100 21%" Press 'q' $ busybox less -M seq.txt Status line says: "seq.txt lines 1-23/24 96%" ^^ ^^^ (Not 100 lines) Press 'q' $ seq 1 100 | less -M "lines 1-23" Press '>' and then press '<': "lines 1-23/100 21%" Press 'q' $ seq 1 100 | busybox less -M "standard input lines 1-23/24 96%" ^^ ^^^ The total number of lines and percentage shouldn't be shown if stdin wasn't finished reading (i.e. no EOF encountered yet). Press '>' and then press '<': "standard input lines 1-23/101 23%" ^^^ ('vi' and GNU 'less' say 100. I'm not complaining about this off-by-one, but it could be a separate bug report.)
Fixed by commit 193ba408a (less: improvements to verbose status messages). The first release containing this commit was 1.24.0.