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A terminal pager, or paging program, is a computer program used to view (but not modify) the contents of a text file moving down the file one line or one screen at a time. Some, but not all, pagers allow movement up a file. A popular cross-platform terminal pager is more. More can move forwards and backwards in text files but cannot move backwards in pipes. [1] less is a more advanced pager that allows movement forward and backward, and contains extra functions such as search. [2]
A computer program is a collection of instructions that performs a specific task when executed by a computer. Most computer devices require programs to function properly.
A text file is a kind of computer file that is structured as a sequence of lines of electronic text. A text file exists stored as data within a computer file system. In operating systems such as CP/M and MS-DOS, where the operating system does not keep track of the file size in bytes, the end of a text file is denoted by placing one or more special characters, known as an end-of-file marker, as padding after the last line in a text file. On modern operating systems such as Microsoft Windows and Unix-like systems, text files do not contain any special EOF character, because file systems on those operating systems keep track of the file size in bytes. There are for most text files a need to have end-of-line delimiters, which are done in a few different ways depending on operating system. Some operating systems with record-orientated file systems may not use new line delimiters and will primarily store text files with lines separated as fixed or variable length records.
In computing, more is a command to view the contents of a text file one screen at a time. It is available on Unix and Unix-like systems, DOS, Digital Research FlexOS, IBM/Toshiba 4690 OS, IBM OS/2, Microsoft Windows and ReactOS. Programs of this sort are called pagers. more is a very basic pager, originally allowing only forward navigation through a file, though newer implementations do allow for limited backward movement.
Some programs incorporate their own paging function, for example bash's tab completion function. [3]
GNU Bash or simply Bash is a Unix shell and command language written by Brian Fox for the GNU Project as a free software replacement for the Bourne shell. First released in 1989, it has been used widely as the default login shell for most Linux distributions and Apple's macOS Mojave and earlier versions. A version is also available for Windows 10. It is also the default user shell in Solaris 11.
Command-line completion is a common feature of command-line interpreters, in which the program automatically fills in partially typed commands.
