Less is More, or is it Most?
While more
, less
and most
are all filters for paging through text one screenful at a time. less
is the default pager within the Linux community, whilst more
is the standard pager within Solaris. So which should I use?
The answer is whichever you wish. For me a old hat with Solaris I'll stick with more
whilst colleagues often use less
and those who run other flavours of UNIX/Linux I guess use there own preference.
From the man pages for all three paging utilities:
Pager | Man page... |
---|---|
more | more is a filter for paging through text one screenful at a time. This version is especially primitive. |
less | Less is a program similar to more(1), but it has many more features. Less does not have to read the entire input file before starting, so with large input files it starts up faster than text editors like vi(1). |
most | most is a paging program that displays, one windowful at a time, the contents of a file on a terminal. Unlike other paging programs, most is capable of displaying an arbitrary number of windows. |
The choice is yours which you use...
So you want to use less
as your default when looking into man pages? That's easy: Just put
export PAGER="less"
into your .profile
or .bashrc
files.