pg (Unix)

pg is a terminal pager program on Unix and Unix-like systems for viewing text files. 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.[1]

Example output of the pg command in xterm.

As of 2018, pg has been removed[2] from the POSIX 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.

Unix command-line interface programs and shell builtins
File system	cat chmod chown chgrp cksum cmp cp dd du df file fuser ln ls mkdir mv pax pwd rm rmdir split tee touch type umask
Processes	at bg crontab fg kill nice ps time
User environment	env exit logname mesg talk tput uname who write
Text processing	awk basename comm csplit cut diff dirname ed ex fold head iconv join m4 more nl paste patch printf sed sort strings tail tr uniq vi wc xargs
Shell builtins	alias cd echo test unset wait
Searching	find grep
Documentation	man
Software development	ar ctags lex make nm strip yacc
Miscellaneous	bc cal expr lp od sleep true and false
Categories Standard Unix programs Unix SUS2008 utilities List

pg (Unix)

History

References

See also