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Simply use a different letter for each marked position. You are not limited to a single mark point. When you want to go back to this mark, simply press ‘ followed by that letter: 'a You can add a mark by pressing the key ‘m’ followed by a letter. Less allows you to add marks, sort of flags, to any line. While you are scrolling through a big text file and you find something interesting, but you also need to continue checking the file, how would you remember that interesting point? Answer is marking. Tip: If you use &pattern it will display only the lines that matched the pattern. You can also press ‘-I’ key combination before performing a search inside less. If you forgot to use this option, don’t worry. To ignore case, you can use less with -I option less -I No need to worry about a forward or backward search.īy default, search in less is case sensitive. Personally, I prefer doing a forward search and then press n or N to cycle through all the matches. You can use ‘?pattern’ to perform a backward search. The ‘/pattern’ performs a forward search. You can move back to the previous match with ‘N’ key. If there are more than one match, you can move to the next matched text by pressing ‘n’ key. patternĪs you can see, the matched text is highlighted. To find a word or phrase or even a regex pattern, press / and type whatever you want to find. If you have a large text file, it’s better to search for a specific piece of text rather than reading it line by line in order to find it manually. You’ll see an output like this: Displaying line numbers in less 5. If you want to see the line numbers in the less command output, you can use the option N in the following manner: less -N If you want to go to the end of the file, press ‘G’ key. If you want to move to the beginning of the file, use ‘g’ key. If you want to move page by page, use space key to move to next page and ‘b’ key to go back to the previous page. You can use the up and down arrow keys to move line by line. You’ll see only the text that fills up to your terminal screen.
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The output of less is divided into sort of pages.
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I added the existing before so that you may follow the rest of the less command examples easily as you would need to exit the files between different examples (if you are practicing the commands while reading this article). Simply press ‘q’ at any given point to exit from less.
#Command line search for text in files how to
If you are not used to of less command, you might struggle to find how to exit less. Note: If you view a short text file with less, you would see empty blank lines at the top. The output will be something like this: Viewing text file with less View a text file with lessĪs showed in the syntax, you can use the less command to view a file in the following fashion: less etc/services is a big file with hundreds of line and once copied, you can use it for your practice. Instead of creating a huge text file by hand, I would advise copying the existing file from /etc/services to your home directory or wherever you want to practice these commands.
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It is better to work with a big file to understand the usage of the less command. Let’s see how to use the less command in Linux with some practical examples. Practical examples of less command in Linux Let’s see some of the most useful examples of less command in Linux. There are numerous options with less command but it’s better to focus on the practical usage that will be more useful for you. The syntax for the less command is extremely simple: less filename Since less is ‘read only‘, you don’t have the risk of accidentally editing the files you are viewing. But less is faster than Vim or other such text editors because it doesn’t read the entire file before starting. Some people prefer using Vim for reading large text files. You can also search for text and monitor files in real time with it. With less, you can read large text files without cluttering your terminal screen. This is where less command helps you big time. You cannot perform any more operations like searching for a particular text after you have used the cat command here. Using the cat command will simply fill the entire terminal screen with those lines. Imagine that you have a text file with over a thousand line. But cat is not always the best option for displaying the content of a file. Cat is perhaps the most elementary command that almost every Linux user knows in this regard. There are ways to read text files in Linux command line.