Equivalent of 'More' command in Powershell?

Question

Is there a way to paginate the output by piping it to some 'more' command, which is available in linux\unix shells?

Answer 1

more isn't used to limit output, it's used to paginate output and make it easier to read in a terminal, if anything.

Are you talking about using head and tail? EggHeadCafe has an example of:

type my.txt | select-object -first 10

type my.txt | select-object -last 10

to emulate head and tail.

Answer 2

Well... There is "more", which is more or less (...) the same you'd expect from other platforms. Try the following example:

dir -rec | more

Answer 3

The Powershell Community Extensions have a handy function named 'less' that provides a more complete Unix-style feature set, using a ported copy of less.exe to actually handle the paging.

C:\Code> cat Function:\Less

$OutputEncoding = [Console]::OutputEncoding

if ($args) {
    & "$Pscx:Home\Applications\Less-394\less.exe" @($args |? { test-path $_ } |% { "`"$(resolve-path $_)`"" })
}
else {
    $input | out-string | & "$Pscx:Home\Applications\Less-394\less.exe"
}

You can pipe strings to it, or give filenames as direct parameters.

type foo.txt | less
less foo.txt, bar.txt, baz.txt

Unfortunately it doesn't work the way you'd expect under the v2.0 ISE.

Answer 4

Yes there is:

some-cmdlet | out-host -paging