Am I missing some amazing rich features in the world of pagers? All I want is for something to pause the terminal when a screenful is reached, let me page back sometimes and that’s about it. more(1) does seem to handle that, primitive or not.
A variant of that feature I use pretty often in less is pressing & to search instead of /. That hides all lines except the matching ones, like an interactive grep.
Yes. Less has a few tricks. “shift >” will take you to the end of the file. “shift <” back to the beginning. “/” allows you to search. Typing “10” will take you to line 10. “?” allows you to search backwards. I actually use all of these features every day.
Hah, true. I’ve been using less so long that the only time I end up using more is on embedded systems, which are typically using BusyBox’s back scrolling-less version.
I already wondered why there are both. It more or less makes sense now. ;) Thank you for the interesting link!
Can we all please stop with the “more” and “less” puns? The more I hear about them the less I am inclined to read this article to the end.
I’m most interested for the puns to stop.
unix pagers also support horizontal scrolling! (well, most.)
Reminds me a bit of one joke an old unix admin told me:
You can always tell how old a unix command is by how short it is and how many arguments it takes.
Cases in point ps, ls, etc…
In this case,
pgis the traditional pager program.Am I missing some amazing rich features in the world of pagers? All I want is for something to pause the terminal when a screenful is reached, let me page back sometimes and that’s about it. more(1) does seem to handle that, primitive or not.
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A variant of that feature I use pretty often in
lessis pressing&to search instead of/. That hides all lines except the matching ones, like an interactivegrep.Yes. Less has a few tricks. “shift >” will take you to the end of the file. “shift <” back to the beginning. “/” allows you to search. Typing “10” will take you to line 10. “?” allows you to search backwards. I actually use all of these features every day.
lesscan switch into and out of ‘follow’ mode withF, which means you get the benefit of a pager, but also of e.gtail -f.Ok. Now the word ‘more’ sounds funny.
I remember years ago looking at the GNU tools and remembering that “GNU’s Not Unix”…and that’s absolutely true. :)
I would’ve appreciated a list of the new features in less.
Does this one not need to be
pgrated?Seriously though, an interesting history (and I wonder why
moreon most systems doesn’t have back scrolling if it was added in 4.3BSD!).Linux more has back scrolling but just with files, not pipes.
Hah, true. I’ve been using less so long that the only time I end up using more is on embedded systems, which are typically using BusyBox’s back scrolling-less version.