Unix/Q/Is there a command like more that is the opposite of less?
Is there a command like more that is the opposite of less?
- Short answer: yes —
more itself. It's not really the "opposite" of less, though; it's the older, simpler pager that less was written to replace. more shipped first, in 3BSD (1978). It pages forward through text one screen at a time and, in its original form, can't scroll backward.less came later (Mark Nudelman, 1983-85) as a more capable pager: backward scrolling, search, and the ability to start before the whole input has loaded. Its name is a pun on "less is more" — less does more than more, hence the joke.- So there's no separate command that's the naming "opposite" of
less — more already is, and it predates less. On most modern systems (Linux, macOS) the more binary is a distinct, more limited implementation from less, not just an alias for it. - Bonus in the same joke lineage:
most, a pager written to do even more than less (multi-file, multi-window, wider horizontal scrolling support).