compatibility issue with cat while piping in scripts

[arnvgh]

What steps will reproduce the bug?

1. get into any folder with some files and execute ls | cat -n | less it should give output with numbers (as the cat man page says -n for number all output lines)

     1  bar
     2  foo
(END)

NOTE: even if we don't pipe it with less it will give the same output. (This is where the incompatibility comes in)

2. Doing the same thing with bat ls | bat -n | less omits the numbers and prints

bar
foo
(END)

while when I don't pipe the same command in less it outputs the following

   1 bar
   2 foo

What did you expect to happen instead?

As bat meant to be a cat(1) clone I assume the behavior should be consistent (same in both the cases as cat).
It should not remove the number lines when it is called with the --number|-n flag even while piping into other command such as less.

How did you install bat?

sudo dnf install bat

bat version and environment

Software version

bat 0.24.0

Operating system

Linux 6.8.4-200.fc39.x86_64

Command-line

bat --diagnostic

Environment variables

SHELL=/usr/bin/zsh
PAGER=less
LESS=-R
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_ALL=<not set>
BAT_PAGER=<not set>
BAT_PAGING=<not set>
BAT_CACHE_PATH=<not set>
BAT_CONFIG_PATH=<not set>
BAT_OPTS=<not set>
BAT_STYLE=<not set>
BAT_TABS=<not set>
BAT_THEME=<not set>
XDG_CONFIG_HOME=/home/ag/.config
XDG_CACHE_HOME=/home/ag/.cache
COLORTERM=truecolor
NO_COLOR=<not set>
MANPAGER=<not set>

System Config file

Could not read contents of '/etc/bat/config': No such file or directory (os error 2).

Config file

Could not read contents of '/home/ag/.config/bat/config': No such file or directory (os error 2).

Custom assets metadata

Could not read contents of '/home/ag/.cache/bat/metadata.yaml': No such file or directory (os error 2).

Custom assets

'/home/ag/.cache/bat' not found

Compile time information

• Profile: release
• Target triple: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
• Family: unix
• OS: linux
• Architecture: x86_64
• Pointer width: 64
• Endian: little
• CPU features: fxsr,sse,sse2
• Host: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu

Less version

> less --version
less 633 (POSIX regular expressions)
Copyright (C) 1984-2023  Mark Nudelman

less comes with NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
For information about the terms of redistribution,
see the file named README in the less distribution.
Home page: https://greenwoodsoftware.com/less