How to scroll one page at a time in Linux at the command line?

Question

In windows, you could do a

dir | more

to scroll one page a time. How does one do this in Linux?

Answer 1

The same ls | more although most people use the ls | less command as it has more features, such as scrolling back as well as forwards, and searching for text.

To scroll forwards a screen press space. To scroll back a screen press 'b'. To search for some text type /something.

And as always man less for more details.

Answer 2

First, the equivalent to Windows's dir is ls (to see just file names) or ls -l (to see file names and metadata).

Often you don't need to do anything at all as most terminal environment let you scroll back a few hundreds of lines (depending on configuration) using a scroll bar or (often) with Shift+PgUp and Shift+PgDn.

If you have very long output or want to search, you can pipe into more (i.e. ls -l | more) the same way you did on Windows, but most people use less (ls -l | less), an improvement on more which gets its name from its ability to also go backwards (amongst other features). Another less common alternative to more is most.