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Maybe I just suck, but it's really hard to find guides to doing simple things in linux. I bought this "Linux for windows addict" book and it just tells you about things and doesn't give you any commands to use, or at least, only a few.
"more" is a program that displays 24 lines at a time from its input file. Even DOS has a more command. When you type (or cat) a big file the output will scroll across the screen and you may lose the stuff you wanted to see. In unix-land, pipes were the way to do things, so some genius came up with a program that would stop output after 24 lines and wait for some key to be depressed. If you entered "cat bigfile | more", the output would go 24 lines at a time and any key would bring up the next page.
more has pretty much disappeared and has bee replaced by less. Do I detect a bit of irony in the play on words here?
Just for reference, long strings of commands like `blah < foo | bar "foobar" | FOO > BAR.foo' can usually be broken down into parts. The pipe ( | ) directs the output of the program on the left of it to the program on the right. "<" uses a file for the input to a program. Likewise ">" puts the output into a file.
So in the above (fanciful) example, blah takes its input from file foo and directs the output to bar. bar then does something with that and directs the new output to FOO. FOO does something to that and directs the output to the file BAR.foo.
Grep is a commonly used command for pipes. Basically it searches the input for the string provided to it, and outputs all matches. For instance, `ls /dev | grep "hda"' will list all the strings with "hda" in them. It's a handy too to filter data.
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