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Is there a command in the Windows DOS prompt that is equivalent to the UNIX less or more?

Basically, the problem is that when I type hg log, the output has too many lines to fit on the screen and I want to paginate it.

Any ideas on how to solve this problem?

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    less: greenwoodsoftware.com/less it is part of the gnuwin32 set of ports for windows: gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages.html
    – MaQleod
    Commented May 19, 2012 at 2:41
  • what is wrong with the "more" command that has been a part of the command interpreter for as long as I can remember? I am guessing DOS 5.x and Winnt 3.x AT LEAST and newer. Did you even TRY to use the more command as you would in linux?? IT WORKS.
    – Señor CMasMas
    Commented Mar 3, 2021 at 18:06
  • If you have downloaded git, git bash provides the 'less' , 'tail' etc.
    – Ishan Tomar
    Commented Jun 19 at 14:03

8 Answers 8

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Windows has the command more. E.g. (Taken from Wikipedia)

To display the file named letter.txt on the screen, the user can type either of the following two commands:

 more < letter.txt
 type letter.txt | more

So in your case you want hg log | more.

For heavier usage you will want something like UnxUtils or GnuWin32, which have a more powerful less utility.

. enter image description here

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    Yea, but the Windoze version only pauses the screen for a page at a time. You can't page up and down through the output. I've never used gow (mentioned in another reply) but I use UnxUtils every day. I love having grep, more, head, tail, sed, wc and other tools in Windoze.
    – Tom
    Commented May 19, 2012 at 2:35
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    @Tom: That is what more does on *nix as well. less is the one with backwards scrolling support, as you've noticed.
    – Daniel Andersson
    Commented May 20, 2012 at 21:31
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    Get less. less is more.
    – hookenz
    Commented Mar 4, 2019 at 20:21
  • unfortunately, hg diff | less and hg diff | more don't preserve color highlighting, so unlike with git, with hg one either has colorful text or scrolling... (tested on Win 10 x64, with less from UnxUtils, in cmd)
    – YakovL
    Commented Mar 12, 2019 at 12:25
  • That command output should be fenced text; not a screenshot.
    – RokeJulianLockhart
    Commented Jul 17 at 23:23
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On Windows 10, you can install the Windows Subsystem for Linux:

The Windows Subsystem for Linux lets developers run Linux environments -- including most command-line tools, utilities, and applications -- directly on Windows, unmodified, without the overhead of a virtual machine.

Once installed, start bash.exe and run less /mnt/c/temp/test.txt to open the file test.txt located in c:\temp.

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  • This is the most up-to-date answer here!
    – Param Siddharth
    Commented Oct 15, 2020 at 2:37
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If you don't mind installing additional software gow is a nice toolkit with a set of standalone unix style tools that you can use, including less and more - it requires an install since it adds itself to path, but you can copy and use the install directory elsewhere as well.

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  • This toolkit is epic! less, grep, wget, curl, ssh, whereis.. and many more standard unix console tools, directly in windows CMD! and only 18MB.. windows CMD is now actually useful
    – user189814
    Commented May 27, 2016 at 11:01
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Up-to-date less build for Windows is here: http://adoxa.altervista.org/less/index.html

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I install a ready-to-run less via choco:

choco install less

https://chocolatey.org/packages/Less

It uses the binary generated by the aforementioned less-Windows

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  • winget install jftuga.less
    – alexei
    Commented Apr 22, 2023 at 8:29
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Here you can find up-to-date less builds for Windows: https://github.com/jftuga/less-Windows/releases

This are the reccomended Windows builds on the less official download page.

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If you're running a recent version of Windows and have Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) installed, you can run Linux's less directly from CMD:

wsl less "my file.txt"

File paths must be expressed in terms of the WSL filesystem:

wsl less "/mnt/c/Users/coejoder/Documents/my file.txt"

Or converted using wslpath in a subshell:

wsl less "$(wslpath "C:\Users\coejoder\Documents\my file.txt")"
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I used UnxUtils for many years. In most recent installations, I just use the Git for Windows which embeds mingw-based utilities. It installs all same commands than UnxUtils and also includes compression utilities variants like zcat, zless.

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