more

What it does

more is a simple terminal pager: it displays a file one screen at a time, letting you advance page by page or line by line, but — unlike less — it's traditionally forward-only, with no reliable way to scroll back up once you've moved past a section. It's the historical predecessor to less (whose name is a pun: "less is more"), and while less has effectively replaced it in daily use, more still ships on virtually every Unix-like system.

Beginner examples

• more file.txt — page through a file, one screen at a time
• Press Space to advance a full page
• Press Enter to advance a single line
• Press q to quit

more /etc/services

Advanced examples

• Start viewing partway through a file: more +100 access.log
• Search forward for a pattern while paging: type /pattern then Enter
• Pipe long command output through more for controlled paging: dmesg | more
• Squeeze consecutive blank lines while viewing a sparsely-formatted file: more -s file.txt
• Repaint each page from the top instead of scrolling, useful over slow connections: more -c file.txt

dmesg | more +50

Common mistakes

• Expecting to scroll backward with b or arrow keys the way you can in less — classic more doesn't support that reliably.
• Using more in a script expecting non-interactive output — like any pager, it waits for keypresses and will hang a non-interactive script; redirect to a file or use cat instead for scripts.
• Assuming more's search and navigation are as capable as less's — they're intentionally minimal.
• Confusing more's prompt (often just a : at the bottom) for an error, when it's simply waiting for the next keypress.

Tips

• On most modern Linux distributions, more is either symlinked to less or wraps similar functionality, so behavior can vary — check with type more.
• If you find yourself wanting to scroll backward, just switch to less; there's little reason to fight more's forward-only design.
• Use more +NUM to jump straight to a line number when you already know roughly where the content of interest starts.

Best practices

• Prefer less over more for interactive file viewing in day-to-day work — it does everything more does plus backward scrolling and richer search.
• Reserve more for minimal environments (rescue shells, embedded systems, containers) where less might not be installed but more is guaranteed present.
• Never rely on more inside non-interactive scripts or CI pipelines; it will block waiting for input that never comes.

Real-world use cases

• Paging through command output on a minimal or embedded system where less isn't installed.
• Quickly viewing a file in a rescue environment or a stripped-down container image.
• Teaching or learning Unix history — understanding why less's name is a joke about more's limitations.

Common interview questions

• What's the difference between more and less? more is traditionally forward-only paging with limited search, while less supports both forward and backward navigation and richer search, without needing to read the whole file first.
• Why is less named that way? As a pun on the phrase "less is more," referencing that it improves on more while doing more with less overhead in some respects.
• Is more still relevant today? Mostly for minimal or legacy environments; less has superseded it for interactive use on virtually all modern systems, though more still ships everywhere for compatibility.