How to pause listing long text file with cat in command prompt after 10lines then press any key

Question

How to pause listing long text file with cat in command prompt after 10lines then press any key. for example:

cat myfiles.txt

bla
bla
bla
bla
bla
bla
.
.
.
bla
press enter to continue

Solution 1

You can use less or more. Both will work.

The less command is more commonly used and provides more functionality than more.

Using both less or more, you can traverse a file page by page using the space bar, and line by line using the enter key.

There's no need to cat and pipe the file, either. You can just run the command on the file.

E.g. less myfile.txt

Solution 2

more and less are pagers which deal with paging through text on the console. less is more functional, but more is closer to what you want. If you specify the -d option more will show how to move to the next page, and you can use -num to specify the number of lines to show at a time (instead of auto detecting the screen size).

% more -d -5 myfiles.txt
bla
bla
bla
bla
bla
--More--(4%)[Press space to continue, 'q' to quit.]

Solution 3

You should try cat myfiles.txt | more

Solution 4

You can use scroll-lock, although it might not be very useful if data rate is high. Ctrl-s to block and Ctrl-q to unblock.

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Comments

[jdd]

less is more common these days

[hayath786]

You could also try most instead.

[Alessio]

or just more myfiles.txt without the UUOC.

[alchemy]

Does anyone know why these dont work in initrd or when using init=/bin/bash? Less is not found by Ubuntu's initrd, but more and scrolling dont work making seeing anything longer than a page seem impossible?