pg is a
terminal pager program on
Unix and
Unix-like
A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X, *nix 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 Uni ...
systems for viewing
text file
A text file (sometimes spelled textfile; an old alternative name is flat file) 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 ope ...
s. It can also be used to page through the output of a command via a
pipe. pg uses an interface similar to
vi, but commands are different.
As of 2018, pg has been removed
The 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 application programming interfaces (APIs), along with comm ...
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.
References
See also
* less
* more
* most (Unix)
Terminal pagers
{{unix-stub