How to view or display contents of a file in linux one screen at a time?

more and less are paging commands used in Unix/*nix systems to display contents of a file one screen at a time. The difference between more and less is that, less supports both forward and backward navigation through a file. Whereas more supports forward navigation but backward navigation is very much limited.



more

more is primitive of the two commands. Originally more supported only forward navigation in a file but the more recent version supports limited backward navigation. 

Syntax for more is
more [options] filename

 more ReadMe.txt

less 

less is the opposite of more. It supports both forward and backward navigation.  less command is very much useful when the input file size is very large. This is because, unlike text editors less don't have to read the entire file. So less will start displaying the file much more faster at the same time utilizing lesser resources.


 Syntax for less is similar to more

less [options] filename

 less ReadMe.txt
Apart from files, more and less can be used along with pipes. For example to long list all files in /etc one screen at a time, type:

ls -l /etc | less

Sample Screenshot:

You can navigate through the list in a similar way you can navigate through a text file.
For all options and interactive commands that can be used along with more and less refer the corresponding man pages.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Understanding awk command with examples

Image
Awk is a simple and powerful programming language used for processing text files. It is widely used by system administrators as a data manipulation, extraction and reporting tool. Awk treats every file as a sequence of records and by default each records are separated by a new line. Each record consist of one or more fields which are by default separated by a space. The syntax for awk command is
Read more

Understanding sed command with example -Part 1

sed is a *nix stream editor command with the ability to filter and transform input text files line by line. sed command works very well with awk command and they are used together by System Administrators to simplify day to day activities. The syntax for sed command is sed [options] commands <input-file> One thing that distinguishes sed from other editors are its ability to filter text in a pipeline. In this first of the two post series on sed we will cover 3 of the most often used commands. They are Print (p) command Quit (q) command Delete (d) command
Read more

How to install a Software in Linux

Image
After a fresh installation of a Linux distro your Laptop/PC/Server will contain almost all the essential software required for your system to work. But situations may arise where you have to depend upon additional software to perform your day to day activities. In this post we will look how to install a software in Linux.
Read more