Some systems may have less pagers installed that do not respond to the
$LESS environment variable.  For example, more on at least some
versions of OS X is less, but does not actually respond to
$LESS.  If such as pager is the system pager you will likely end up
seeing gibberish in the pager.  If this is your use case you will need to
set-up a custom pager configuration object that sets the correct system
variables (see Pager).