[Tutor] Scrolling through output in shell

[Alan Gauld]

"Lie Ryan" <lie.1296 at gmail.com> wrote

> both "more" and "less". The most striking difference between "more" 
> and
> "less" is that "more" is simple forward-only, you can't scroll up, 
> only
> down. "less" support both backward and forward navigation.

On very early Unices that was true but for the last 20 years more
has had two direction paging plus searching etc. more also usually
supports the v key which takes you into view (which is read-only vi)
and some mores even have an e key to take you to the EDITOR.

less is like many of the GNU tools an early equivalent to more
which grew extra features and some slight inconsistencies. The
biggest difference that I find vbetween more and less is that you
always have to exit from less whereas more usually exits
automatically at the end of file - which is a real pain if you want
to go back to the second last page! And for that reason alone
I usually use less. (I believe less can also be configured to
use the emacs keystrokes rather than the vi keys of more
although I've never tried that.)

Alan G.