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It seems that more adds line breaks, whereas cat does not. As a result cat results will change to fit the terminal window if I resize the window, whereas more results stay put with the line breaks added the first time. My question is why, and is there any way to make more behave like cat? (I really don't like this setting of more, when I copy I end up getting the line breaks that I don't want.)

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Reset to default
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Reading man more:

-f Count logical lines, rather than screen lines (i.e., long lines are not folded).

preceded by:

OPTIONS
Options are also taken from the environment variable MORE (make sure to precede them with a dash (-)) but command-line options will override those.

So at your convenience you can either do:

more -f /some/file/with/long/lines

or export it in the MORE variable:

$ export MORE=-f
$ more /some/file/with/long/lines

This should probably be put in some shell login script such as $HOME/.profile.

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  • I saw you asked "why" and admit I'm still dumbfounded at what historical reason probably related to vt100 behaviour or email conventions or even very old printer output (3 random wild guesses) made want having more doing this.
    – A.B
    Mar 29, 2019 at 17:41
  • ah, I didn't realize 'fold' means something different from 'wrap' here. Thanks so much!!
    – welkin
    Mar 29, 2019 at 18:18

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