Lesson 14: Viewing files with less¶
less is a pager program
used to view the contents of a text file. You will not automatically
return to the terminal prompt after the file contents have been
displayed. Pages can be scrolled forward by pressing space
and
backward by pressing b
. To exit less
, press q
(for quit).
The less
program also does many other useful things (including text
searching using the /
character).
Note
Other commands can be found by pressing h
key.
Let's add another line to the same file as the previous step and open
the file with less
:
[learner planets]$ echo "Earth is the only planet that has liquid water on its surface." >> earth.txt
[learner planets]$ less earth.txt
Note that we use the append operator, >>
and not just >
. Remember,
if we only used >
, we would end up overwriting the file.