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How can I scroll in bash using only the keyboard? If it's not possible in bash, are there any other shells that support this?

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This is not a feature of the shell, it's a feature of the terminal emulator. See What is the exact difference between a 'terminal', a 'shell', a 'tty' and a 'console'? What terminal are you using? – Gilles Jan 5 at 17:22
It's kind of sad that four people considered this question good enough to spend a few minutes on an answer but no one bothered to vote it up. – Marco Jan 5 at 19:15
@Marco I suppose there is a difference between seeing a question as "good", and seeing an opportunity to earn some rep (or maybe even a new hat). – jordanm Jan 5 at 20:42
@jordanm Sadly, hats ended yesterday – Michael Mrozek♦ Jan 5 at 21:40
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@MichaelMrozek That was a short "Winter". – jordanm Jan 6 at 1:54

4 Answers

up vote 17 down vote accepted

In terminal (not graphic emulator like gterm) works Shift+PageUp or Shift+PageDown

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I just tried this in the latest version of PuTTY (b0.62) and it works. Just for the reference. Cheers. – Mario Awad Jan 8 at 21:55
Shift+Uparrow and shift+Downarrow also work for line at a time scrolling. – Joe Jan 13 at 7:03
up vote 6 down vote

This depends on your terminal emulator, not the shell you are using. I personally use GNU Screen. From the description:

Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes, typically interactive shells.

You can use C-a [ to enter scrollback mode. From here, you can scroll with the keyboard and even copy and paste.

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up vote 3 down vote

And there is tmux, like screen.

Use CTRL+B then [ to use arrow keys to scroll. Use q to exit scroll mode.

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up vote 2 down vote

In most terminals that I known you can use Shift+PageUp and Shift-DownDown for scrolling. Note that some terminals don't support scrolling, or others use a very limited history buffer. In the latter case, you may want to increase the limit.

As an alternative, use a pager, for example less.

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