File Viewing & Editing

more

View file contents one screenful at a time with forward-only paging.

Synopsis

syntax
more [OPTION]... [FILE]...

Examples

Page through a file
more file.txt
Page through kernel messages
dmesg | more
Start viewing from line 100
more +100 largefile.log

Common options

FlagDescription
-dDisplay help prompt instead of bell
-fCount logical lines, not screen lines
-sSqueeze multiple blank lines
+nStart at line number n

About more

The `more` command view file contents one screenful at a time with forward-only paging. Text viewing and editing commands are fundamental tools in any Linux user's toolkit.

Linux treats almost everything as a file, so the ability to quickly inspect, filter, transform, and edit file contents from the command line is critical. These commands are regularly combined with pipes and redirects to build powerful data-processing pipelines.

The command accepts 4 commonly used flags shown above, though the full set of options is available in the man page (`man more`). The 3 examples on this page cover typical real-world usage patterns that you can copy and adapt for your own workflows.

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