less

Read a big file page by page

What it does

less opens a file in a viewer: space goes a page forward, b back, the arrow keys move line by line, g and G jump to the start and the end. Quit with q.

Search with /, the text and Enter; n jumps to the next match. less does not read the whole file up front, so it opens even gigabyte logs quickly.

Syntax

less <file>

Examples

• Page through the large file server.log

  less server.log

  • less — scrollable viewer, quit with q
  • server.log — file

Related commands

• cat — Print a file to the terminal
• head — Show the first lines of a file
• tail — Show the last lines of a file, or follow it

Practise · All commands