Paging Through Content (less/more)

Command Equivalents

Description

When the content of a file is too long to be displayed on a single screen, you need a “pager” to view it one page at a time. In Linux, the primary tools for this are less and more.

In PowerShell, this is not a built-in feature of Get-Content itself. Instead, it is achieved by taking the output of Get-Content and piping it | to a command that handles paging. There are two common ways to do this.

Method 1: Piping to more

PowerShell includes a more function that behaves very much like the more and less commands from the Linux world. This is the most common and straightforward method for paging through text.

Usage

You pipe the output of Get-Content (or its alias cat) directly to the more command.

# Get the content of a large file and display it page by page
Get-Content -Path "C:\Windows\Logs\CBS

Interactive Controls

Once the pager is active, you can use the following keys:

• Spacebar: Display the next page.
• Enter: Display the next line.
• q: Quit and return to the prompt.

Method 2: Piping to Out-Host -Paging

This is the more formal, “native PowerShell” way to achieve the same result. The Out-Host cmdlet is responsible for displaying things on the console, and its -Paging parameter tells it to do so with an interactive pager.

Usage

For interactive use, the result is identical to using more.

# This command functions identically to the 'more' example
Get-Content -Path "C:\Windows\Logs\CBS\CBS.log" | Out-Host -Paging

Which Method Should You Use?

For day-to-day interactive use, | more is quicker to type and perfectly effective. Out-Host -Paging is good to know as it’s the underlying cmdlet that provides this functionality, but it offers no major advantage over more for simply viewing a file.