O arquivo é exibido corretamente se você cat
(ou usou head
para encurtar a saída)?
Acho que a chave para tornar less
a exibição correta do arquivo é definir LANG
ou LC_ALL
corretamente. Em seu sistema local e no sistema remoto, compare os valores dessas variáveis e veja se elas são diferentes, e se alterar o remoto para fazer a diferença faz a diferença.
Na página less
man (observe a última frase):
If neither LESSCHARSET nor LESSCHARDEF is set, but any of the strings "UTF-8", "UTF8", "utf-8" or "utf8" is found in the LC_ALL, LC_TYPE or LANG environment variables, then the default character set is utf-8. If that string is not found, but your system supports the setlocale interface, less will use setlocale to determine the character set. setlocale is controlled by setting the LANG or LC_CTYPE environment variables. Finally, if the setlocale interface is also not available, the default character set is latin1. Control and binary characters are displayed in standout (reverse video). Each such character is displayed in caret notation if possible (e.g. ^A for control-A). Caret notation is used only if inverting the 0100 bit results in a normal printable character. Otherwise, the char‐ acter is displayed as a hex number in angle brackets.