pg is a terminal pager program on

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

and

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X or *nix) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-li ...

systems for viewing

text file A text file (sometimes spelled textfile; an old alternative name is flatfile) is a kind of computer file that is structured as a sequence of lines of electronic text. A text file exists stored as data within a computer file system. In operat ...

s. It can also be used to page through the output of a command via a

pipe Pipe(s), PIPE(S) or piping may refer to: Objects * Pipe (fluid conveyance), a hollow cylinder following certain dimension rules ** Piping, the use of pipes in industry * Smoking pipe ** Tobacco pipe * Half-pipe and quarter pipe, semi-circul ...

. pg uses an interface similar to vi, but commands are different. As of 2018, pg has been removedThe Open Group Base Specifications Issue 7, 2018 edition, C.4 Utilities
/ref> from the

POSIX The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines both the system- and user-level application programming inte ...

specification, but is still included in util-linux. Users are expected to use other paging programs, such as more, less or most.

History

pg is the name of the historical utility on BSD UNIX systems. It was written to address the limit of the historical more command not being able to traverse the input backward. Eventually that ability was added also to more, so both are quite similar.

History

References

See also