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More command

If you want to print the contents of a text file in windows command prompt, more command is very handy.  It can print one page at at time, and when user can press ‘Enter’ key to read the next page.

More command can also be used for reading the output of other commands/applications in the console.

Print the contents of a file, one page at a time.

more data.txt

When the above command is executed, you will see one page of text from the file printed in the command window. If the file
has more content to be displayed, you can see the second page by pressing space bar key. You can do so till you reach to the end
of the file. You can exit the command by pressing ‘q’ at any page.

More command can be used to display the output of other commands output in the above fashion. We can use redirection operation (|) for this.

command | more

For example, if you want to run ‘dir‘ command in a directory with large number of files, you can user more command, to look at the list of the files, one page
at a time. The command for this is given below.

dir | more

Advanced options of more command

more /C data.txt

This would clear the current screen text and then would print the contents of the file data.txt

Read file from n+1 th line instead of reading it from the first line:

more +n filename

Example:
To skip first 100 lines in data.txt and print data from 101 th line, the command is:

more +100 data.txt
4 comments… add one
  • stephen

    why does entering “?*+L+3(<4&(\;+L" without quotes create the behaviour it does? it just keeps prompting with "more?" very wierd.

  • stephen

    “?*+L+3(<4&(\;+L" when entered produces a prompt like this: "more?" why?

  • john

    same problem used it with the ipconfig command and it seemd to go into a endless lope cant even use exit..

  • LenaB

    I was able to stop the loop by CTL Z which displays as ^Z, Enter and the loop stops.

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