I have a script that runs for a long time. It has plenty of output to stdout that I would like to be able to read over in real time but also scroll up and down. Whenever a new line of output is printed to stdout, my screen resets to the bottom of the output (most current content). Is there any way to page through stdout while also having the newest content visible and up-to-date when I scroll down?
I'm on RHEL7. I don't have a GUI and am connected to the host via SSH.
You may use a pager such as less:
program | less
or, if you also want to save the output to a file:
program | tee logfile | less
Within less, you may scroll back and forth, and you may get a tail -f behaviour by pressing F (press Ctrl+C to get out of this mode). You can even start it up in this mode:
program | tee logfile | less +F
To avoid possibly blocking the writes from you program, make the program redirect directly to an output file in the background and then use less on that:
program >logfile &
less logfile
See the manual for less on your system.
less reads some amount of data at first, and then doesn't read more unless you scroll to the end. So there's a chance here that the main program will block on the pipeline if the output is very long. To deal with that, it's probably best to just direct the output to a file and run less on that.
– ilkkachu
Feb 8 at 9:03
command | lessMouse may or may not work in less, make sure to use page up & down if not. – Kenneth B. Jensen Feb 8 at 7:38