I just upgraded to Fedora 36 and it seems the more command has changed. On Fedora 35 (and prior) the command “more /etc/fedora-release” would display “Fedora release nn (xxx)” and then the $ prompt:
$ more /etc/fedora-release
Fedora release 35 (Thirty Five)
$
On Fedora 35 it displays a full page with many blank lines an EOF at the bottom and it requires a Q to get back to the $ prompt:
The more command is designed to produce a page (screen) of data from a file at a time, and allows paging down to see the data at the users pace for reading.
AFAIK it has always used ‘enter’ to page down and ‘q’ to quit. I am not an expert with more since the more advanced command ‘less’ allows moving both up and down within the displayed info and has been my go-to for many many years. ‘less’ allows navigating with enter, up & down arrows, and paging with page up & page down.
POSIX compliance patch preventing exit on EOF without -e [Ian Jones]
So, the default behaviour seems to have changed (corrected for POSIX compliance).
The F35 behaviour would be replicated using more -e .... You can use an alias to always call it with -e by adding this to your ~/.bashrc if you’re using bash:
alias more="more -e"
I’m not seeing this on my Fedora 37 here, but it’s a patch version ahead of F36 from the looks of it. Let’s start with some info: what version of the package are you using?
As far as the original question. Can ‘more’ be reverted to the form where an output of less than a page return to a command prompt.
Answer:
Very easily.
edit ~/.bashrc and add a line alias more="more -e"
This command $more /etc/fedora-release -s is invalid since it places the -s option after the file name, not before, thus is trying to find a file named ‘-s’. This is likely the cause of needing to use the ctrl-C. When I use more with 2 different file names it displays the first file and waits for an exit of that file before it will display the second.
Although there are no blank lines in the second file to ‘squeeze’ the -e exited as soon as the last file was displayed in full and the -s worked with no errors.
You are correct , I did mean Fedora 36 with regards to displaying blank lines.
more -e does give me the behaviour that I am used to ie no EOF unless there is nore than one page of information.
When I use more on RedHat or AIX or any Fedora prior to Fedora 36, it would not fill the screen with blank lines and display EOF and expect a q to quit one a one line file. If there is more than one page/screen of information in the file then it shows “–More–(2%)” and awaits input( shows one more line and space shows the next page/screen. When you get to bottom it ends without displaying EOF and expecting a q to quit 0- ie in all my past experience with the more command it seemed to run as if the -e option had been included.
Seems quite likely that there was an alias created at some point so that a command line ‘more’ actually was aliased and executed as ‘more -e’. Some how that alias may have been removed, but the desired effect may easily be restored by creating your own alias as noted above.
If you were to run cat ~/.bashrc do you see aliases listed there?
If you run alias do you see a list of aliases that are in effect for you? (I have 15 - 20 aliases listed)
It is quite common for users to have an alias for a command so that commonly used options are automatically added.