hello all....is there any way by which the cat command can be made to behave like less or more?

i.e when less or more used with a text file as argument, will display the file 1 page at a time, allowing us to navigate through the file.

So any way for cat to display the file 1 page at a time?

P.S : I don't want to pipe the output of cat to less or more.

Regards,
Vinod

Hi,

Why can't you use less or more instead of cat?

I know less or more will do the job.
but curious to know if cat can get the job done.

more command creates a NOECHO environment.
So would like to know the way by which cat can be made to behave like more or less.

instead of "cat ./text.txt" use "less ./text.txt". more is often a symlink to less. If you still want cat to run as less, you can create an alias. "alias cat=less". I don't know why you would do that though

this was one of the questions I was asked during an interview.
I was wondering if there is a way for cat to behave like less or more on its own.

Hi,

Too my knowledge, cat does not have an option to show content page by page (I don't think it was ever designed to do so).

A lot of people do the following : cat file | more This is, strictly speaking, not wrong, but it is a waste of resources, more file is all it takes (2 commands and a pipe vs one command).

There are probably solutions without using more or less, but they all involve piping the output of the cat command to another (set of) programme(s).

1 members found this post helpful.

http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutil...cat-invocation

I can't think of any way to do this without processing cat's output through some other command or shell script.

The question doesn't even make sense. The purpose of cat is to concatenate files, not to page them.

Edit
Some terminals support Ctrl-s/Ctrl-q to pause and resume output. One must be very quick on the keys, especially on modern hardware. Might this count as an answer?

Maybe cat's output could be directed at some buffered stream device in /dev. You'd still need some way to signal the device to flush its buffer to the terminal and then resume accepting input. I have no clue how one would even begin!

Not according to the man page, but there is always pg. On some systems you could use Ctl-S to freeze the screen, but it doesn't seem to work in Linux.

Thank you all for the response. I guess alias is the way (atleast without much complication)

I just checked. Ctl-S / Ctl-Q won't work in Konsole, but if you leave X altogether and go to the command line, it works fine.

Actually my version of Konsole has a setting for this.

Settings -> Configure Konsole -> General -> Misc -> Use Ctrl+S/Ctrl+Q flow control

Edit
Yeah, it works

You are absolutely right. You learn something new every day.