How to see more lines in the terminal

Question

I'm installing a package and get a load of errors and need to be able to read through all the error messages that come up. Unfortunately the terminal will only display a finite number of lines. How do I go about viewing previous lines or changing the maximum number of lines that can be displayed?

score 64 · Answer 1 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:25

64

Like David Purdue suggests, I myself too. I like to have unlimited scrolling.

editTerminalProfile

You can also enable the scrollbar if you want; but I prefer it disabled and use Shift + Page Up and Shift + Page Down keys to change the output frames.

edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:25

Community

1

answered Dec 04 '13 at 13:50

rusty

16,917

score 50 · Accepted Answer · edited Sep 17 '15 at 12:01

50

Use less:

your_command | less

Your Enter key will take you down.

Also, press q to exit.

edited Sep 17 '15 at 12:01

Varun

525

answered Dec 04 '13 at 12:46

Raja G

105,327
107
262
331

David Purdue · Answer 3 · 2013-12-05T00:26:58.050

31

If you are using the standard Terminal program on a Desktop version of Ubuntu...

Choose Edit -> Profile Preferences from the terminal windows global menu.
Choose the Scrolling tab
Set Scrollback to the desired number of lines (or check the Unlimited box).

Then you can use the scrollbar at the side of the terminal to scroll back through the lengthy command output.

edited Dec 05 '13 at 00:26

answered Dec 04 '13 at 13:07

David Purdue

2,517

score 5 · Answer 4 · answered Nov 14 '23 at 08:16

Ubuntu 22.04

The default number of scroll back lines in Ubuntu 22.04 is 10000. You can change this to any number up to 2147483647 or disable it altogether. Both can be done either from the GUI or from the command line.

From the GUI

Open Terminal -> Settings (the hamburger button) -> Preference -> Profiles -> Unnamed -> Scrolling. There you will see Limit scrollback to. You can either disable it altogether or change the number of lines you want to scroll back like this:

From Command Line

The same thing can be done from the command line, using gsettings. Read more about how this works in this post: How to change gnome-terminal scrollback lines from command line.

Enable unlimited scrollback:

gsettings set org.gnome.Terminal.Legacy.Profile:/org/gnome/terminal/legacy/profiles:/:$(gsettings get org.gnome.Terminal.ProfilesList default | tr -d \')/ scrollback-unlimited true

Limit scrollback to 250,000 lines:

gsettings set org.gnome.Terminal.Legacy.Profile:/org/gnome/terminal/legacy/profiles:/:$(gsettings get org.gnome.Terminal.ProfilesList default | tr -d \')/ scrollback-lines 250000

score 4 · Answer 5 · answered Dec 04 '13 at 13:22

You could start your command in a script session every action an command output would be saved without interfering with the execution unless |less or >file that forbid to have any interaction with the command.

$ script /tmp/command.out
Script started, file is /tmp/command.out
$ the_command
...
$ exit 
Script done, file is /tmp/command.out
$ less /tmp/command.out

score 3 · Answer 6 · answered Jul 20 '16 at 18:33

If you want to see the data and also run it to a file, use tee, e.g,

spark-shell | tee tmp.out

(spark-shell is just the example interactive program that you might want to capture output from.)

This will allow you to type commands in response to output from the program, but also capture the output to a file.

score 2 · Answer 7 · edited Jul 11 '16 at 11:03

2

You could use | to output your command into more. For example, if I wanted to read an entire text file that wouldn't fit on screen using cat, I would use:

cat /home/abcd/Downloads/fileName.txt | more

You can press enter to scroll down one line at a time, and q to exit. Press g to start over.

Hope this could be useful to you.

edited Jul 11 '16 at 11:03

Dev

712

answered Dec 04 '13 at 11:51

M S Parmar

303

score 2 · Answer 8 · answered Dec 04 '13 at 11:52

2

I recommend you to use output redirection. Type:

user@host:~# command >filename

Then you can read the file with a text editor for example less and browser through the output:

user@host:~# less filename

answered Dec 04 '13 at 11:52

chaos

28,186

How to see more lines in the terminal

8 Answers8

Ubuntu 22.04

From the GUI

From Command Line

Linked