File Pagers

When you’re poking around in Linux and want to peek inside a file, you’ve got a handful of handy pager commands at your disposal. Here are some of the ones you can use, plus a few tips for each.

more

Think of more as the classic, old-school pager. Press Space to keep moving through the file. You can also search with /, just like in man pages or vim.

more myFile.txt
cat myFile.txt | more

less

This is the pager most folks actually use day-to-day. It fixes a bunch of more’s limitations: you can scroll with the arrow keys or Space, and / search works here too. Once you try it, you’ll rarely go back.

less myFile.txt
cat myFile.txt | less

view

This one’s basically vim in read-only mode. You get all the movement and search powers of vim, but by default you can’t save changes — unless you really mean it with a ! (and have write permissions).

view myFile.txt

cat

Not technically a pager, but worth mentioning. cat just dumps the whole file to your terminal in one go. Perfect for tiny files, less fun for giant log monsters. It’s also a common building block when you’re piping output to other commands.

cat myFile.txt
cat myFile.txt | grep -v 'notLinesWithThisText'

Not sure which to use?

If you’re not sure which to use, start with less. It’s faster, friendlier, and more flexible than the others. Happy paging! 🎉