A terminal pager, paging program or simply pager is a computer program used to view (but not modify) the contents of a text file moving down the file one line or one screen at a time. Some, but not all, pagers allow movement up a file. A popular cross-platform terminal pager is more, which can move forwards and backwards in text files but cannot move backwards in pipes. less is a more advanced pager that allows movement forward and backward, and contains extra functions such as search.
Some programs incorporate their own paging function, for example bash's tab completion function.
Examples
- Das, Sumitabha (2012). Your UNIX/Linux: The Ultimate Guide (3rd ed.). McGraw-Hill. pp. 31–33, 36, 53, 76–78, 89, 172, 717, 729. ISBN 978-0-07-337620-2.
- Koch, Jeff (1999). Practical UNIX. Indianapolis, Ind.: Que Pub. ISBN 0-585-33105-7. OCLC 45842916.
References
"Debian: An overview of file paging applications". https://debian-administration.org/article/246/An_overview_of_file_paging_applications ↩
manpage of more http://linux.die.net/man/1/more ↩
manpage of less http://linux.die.net/man/1/less ↩
"Bash Reference Manual: Programmable Completion Builtins". gnu.org. http://ftp.gnu.org/old-gnu/Manuals/bash-2.05a/html_node/bashref_104.html#SEC111 ↩
"PG" from linuxmanpages.com at the Wayback Machine (archived 3 September 2014) https://web.archive.org/web/20140903095222/http://www.linuxmanpages.com/man1/pg.1.php ↩
"most(1): browse/page through text file - Linux man page". die.net. http://linux.die.net/man/1/most ↩
"View-Mode". https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/View-Mode.html ↩