Less or More in Windows?

Question

Is there a command in the Windows DOS prompt that is equivalent to the UNIX less or more?

Basically, the problem is that when I type hg log, the output has too many lines to fit on the screen and I want to paginate it.

Any ideas on how to solve this problem?

Solution 1

Windows has the command more. E.g. (Taken from Wikipedia)

To display the file named letter.txt on the screen, the user can type either of the following two commands:

 more < letter.txt
 type letter.txt | more 

So in your case you want hg log | more.

For heavier usage you will want something like UnxUtils or GnuWin32, which have a more powerful less utility.

.

Solution 2

On Windows 10, you can install the Windows Subsystem for Linux:

The Windows Subsystem for Linux lets developers run Linux environments -- including most command-line tools, utilities, and applications -- directly on Windows, unmodified, without the overhead of a virtual machine.

Once installed, start bash.exe and run less /mnt/c/temp/test.txt to open the file test.txt located in c:\temp.

Solution 3

If you don't mind installing additional software gow is a nice toolkit with a set of standalone unix style tools that you can use, including less and more - it requires an install since it adds itself to path, but you can copy and use the install directory elsewhere as well.

Solution 4

Up-to-date less build for Windows is here: http://adoxa.altervista.org/less/index.html

Solution 5

Here you can find up-to-date less builds for Windows: https://github.com/jftuga/less-Windows/releases

This are the reccomended Windows builds on the less official download page.

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Comments

[Admin]

less: greenwoodsoftware.com/less it is part of the gnuwin32 set of ports for windows: gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages.html

[Admin]

what is wrong with the "more" command that has been a part of the command interpreter for as long as I can remember? I am guessing DOS 5.x and Winnt 3.x AT LEAST and newer. Did you even TRY to use the more command as you would in linux?? IT WORKS.

[Tom]

Yea, but the Windoze version only pauses the screen for a page at a time. You can't page up and down through the output. I've never used gow (mentioned in another reply) but I use UnxUtils every day. I love having grep, more, head, tail, sed, wc and other tools in Windoze.

[Daniel Andersson]

@Tom: That is what more does on *nix as well. less is the one with backwards scrolling support, as you've noticed.

[Michelrandahl]

This toolkit is epic! less, grep, wget, curl, ssh, whereis.. and many more standard unix console tools, directly in windows CMD! and only 18MB.. windows CMD is now actually useful

[Yongwei Wu]

Thanks. less is a very important tool. Other implementation I have used suffer from the MSVCRT console I/O bug: yongweiwu.wordpress.com/2016/05/27/msvcrt-dll-console-io-bug‌​. This one is working well.

[fduff]

Thank God for that utils to be ported on windows, I feel much better now! :)

[hookenz]

Get less. less is more.

[YakovL]

unfortunately, hg diff | less and hg diff | more don't preserve color highlighting, so unlike with git, with hg one either has colorful text or scrolling... (tested on Win 10 x64, with less from UnxUtils, in cmd)

[Param Siddharth]

This is the most up-to-date answer here!