Restore interactive commands after accidentally overpaging pipe input to less?

Consider a script like this: $ cat example.sh #! /usr/bin/env bash for i in {1..90} do printf '%s\n' "$i" done sleep 10 printf '91\n' sleep 10 printf 'done\n' and suppose the output is piped to less, like so: $ bash example.sh | less If I scroll down as far as line 90, I can scroll back up again, search, and use any other interactive commands that less provides. However, as soon as I try to go past line 90 with e.g. j or Ctrl-N, less stops responding to interactive commands until another line of input is available. And if I try to scroll a full pageful past line 90 with e.g. spacebar, less stops responding to interactive commands until a full page of input is available or it receives EOF. This can be undesirable if I want to look at previous output and don't realize I have just gone over the available lines and must wait for more lines to appear, which could require an arbitrary amount of time. If I use Ctrl-C to send SIGINT, I can immediately get interactivity again, but then less will stop listening for more input from the pipe. The script is just an easily reproducible example, but it could be replaced by any long-running command that slowly generates lines of output, such as finding broken symbolic links: $ find $HOME -xtype l | less or world-readable permissions in my home directory: $ find $HOME -perm 777 | less or any number of other slow, resource-intensive commands that send lines to stdout. Is there any way I can tell less to stop waiting for more input and regain interactive commands without waiting for the required lines of input to be generated from the pipe?