Pagers (more, ...)

Pagers are commonly used under UNIX, because many, many documents are just plain text or text output of other commands or tools. The best known is more because it's also the oldest still living out there. less or most are clones, which bring together a lot of missing features to more and can be used to completely replace it. They bring for example the scrolling up and down, line-by-line, the decompression on-the-fly of compressed files, …. Some examples of less:

less /etc/passwd
cat /etc/passwd | less

To search in the text shown, simply type / followed by the criteria. To go to the next page, press the spacebar or page down key. To quit, press the q key.

This article was first written in July 2003 for 
the BeezNest technical website (http://glasnost.beeznest.org/articles/41)