*shell*: annoying behavior with long output

[bill]

I'm a big fan of the Emacs shell, but one thing that really annoys
me is its behavior when a lot of output is sent to stdout.  The
cursor ends up at the very bottom of the output, even though,
invariably I'm more interested in looking at the top first and then
work my way down, which means that I end up having to search
backwards for the shell prompt to see the beginning of the output.

I have not found a satisfactory solution to this.  When I'm not in
the Emacs shell, the solution is simple: I pipe the output through
/usr/bin/less.  But the Emacs shell can't handle less too well.

Another thing I've tried is to set the mark before executing a
command, and then C-x C-x after executing it.  The problem with
this is that the top of the output gets placed in the middle of
the screen, so I have to do C-u 0 C-l to see the top screenful of
output.  Besides, this works only when I know ahead of time that
the output will be long.

Is there a way to tell the Emacs shell to keep the cursor at the
top of the output in such a way that the top screenful of output
is what is visible of the *shell* buffer immediately after executing
a command?

Thanks!

        -bill