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How can I scroll up or pause the terminal so I can read text before it goes too far up?

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3 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

You can hold down shift and use Page up and Page down to scroll.

You can also pipe the results to less (eg ls -al | less) or send a copy of the output to a text file with tee (eg ls -al | tee filelist.txt).

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You can temporarily pause your program by pressing Ctrl-Z. This will put your program to sleep, obviously stopping any output. The you can bring it back to the foreground with fg.

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Often Ctrl-S and Ctrl-Q can be used to pause/resume terminal output.

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caveat: Ctrl-S is usually used in bash readline as 'forward-search-history'. This may or may not work. –  Rich Homolka Aug 5 '10 at 18:11
@Rich: When a foreground process is running, readline is inactive and the terminal is reconfigured to pause on ^S. –  grawity Aug 7 '10 at 11:31
Thanks @grawity. Maybe it's different in Konsole, because I get search instead of XOFF. I'll test more, thank you. –  Rich Homolka Aug 9 '10 at 3:49
@Rich: The terminal emulator doesn't matter. –  grawity Aug 11 '10 at 9:47
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