SAMS Teach Yourself Unix in 10 Minutes

Making Output Readable with Pagers

The cat command is fine when you just want to quickly show some information, but what about large files that scroll past a bit too quickly to read and you now can't read them? There is a way to slow down the output of a command like cat, so you can read the data at your speed. Viewing pages one at a time is done with the concept of pagers. Files that scroll off the screen will be useless if you need to read the beginning of the file. If the file's size is larger than what can fit on the terminal screen or in your history buffer, you are out of luck. Files are often large enough to do this, and you will still want to read those files. You can use new Unix commands. You can use more and less. People often refer ...