What command can be used to display all the text in a file to the screen without pausing?

How to pause listing long text file with cat in command prompt after 10lines then press any key. for example:

cat myfiles.txt

bla
bla
bla
bla
bla
bla
.
.
.
bla
press enter to continue

asked Jul 31, 2012 at 3:46

You can use less or more. Both will work.

The less command is more commonly used and provides more functionality than more.

Using both less or more, you can traverse a file page by page using the space bar, and line by line using the enter key.

There's no need to cat and pipe the file, either. You can just run the command on the file.

E.g. less myfile.txt

answered Jul 31, 2012 at 4:53

tacotuesdaytacotuesday

4843 silver badges4 bronze badges

1

more and less are pagers which deal with paging through text on the console. less is more functional, but more is closer to what you want. If you specify the -d option more will show how to move to the next page, and you can use -num to specify the number of lines to show at a time (instead of auto detecting the screen size).

% more -d -5 myfiles.txt
bla
bla
bla
bla
bla
--More--(4%)[Press space to continue, 'q' to quit.]

answered Jul 31, 2012 at 5:40

mgorvenmgorven

2,21218 silver badges19 bronze badges

You should try cat myfiles.txt | more

answered Jul 31, 2012 at 4:00

Chris SChris S

1,3249 silver badges12 bronze badges

3

You can use scroll-lock, although it might not be very useful if data rate is high. Ctrl-s to block and Ctrl-q to unblock.

answered Jul 31, 2012 at 16:49

ThorThor

16.4k3 gold badges51 silver badges68 bronze badges

• SS64
• CMD
• How-to

Display output one screen at a time. MORE can be used to run any executable command (or batch file) and pause the screen output one screen at a time. MORE can also be used to TYPE the contents of any file to the screen.

Syntax
      command | MORE [/E [/C] [/P] [/S] [/Tn] [+n]]

      MORE [/E [/C] [/P] [/S] [/Tn] [+n]] < Pathname

      MORE /E [/C] [/P] [/S] [/Tn] [+n] [Pathname(s)]

Key
   command  : Any executable command or batch file

   Pathname : The file to be displayed. (if more than one separate with spaces)

   /E       : Enable extended features

   /E /C    : Clear screen before displaying page

   /E /P    : Expand FormFeed characters

   /E /S    : Squeeze multiple blank lines into a single line

   /E /Tn   : Expand tabs to n spaces (default 8)

   /E +n    : Start displaying the first file at line n

You can create an environment variable called %MORE% and use this to supply any of the above switches.

More will convert any TAB characters to spaces in the output, by default 8 spaces.

If the output of MORE is redirected to a file (MORE demo.txt > output.txt) it will not prompt for the next page, unless the file contains more than 65,536 lines at which point it will prompt for each additional line.

When the output is redirected, this will also redirect/hide the --More (17%) -- prompts.

If extended features are enabled, (/E) the following keystrokes can be used at the -- More -- prompt:

     Display next page
    Display next line
  Q         Quit
  P n       Display next n lines
  S n       Skip next n lines
  F         Display next file
  =         Show line number
  ?         Show help line

In PowerShell use | Out-Host -Paging in preference to MORE, it will start to yield results immediately through the PowerShell pipeline, without waiting first to collect all the incoming data.

Examples

Convert a Unix text file (LF line endings) to Windows text file (CR/LF)

TYPE UnixFile.txt | MORE /E /P > WindowsFile.txt

“less is more” ~ Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Related commands:

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