To list the files and folders of a directory while running around in an Ubuntu terminal you use of course the classic ls list command. But what if the list it returns is particularly long? Is there a way to pause a ls listing so that you can follow what is going on?
The easiest way to achieve this is by piping the results of the ls command through to the classic more or newer less command. In practice:
ls -lh | less
Now the ls command will begin scrolling through all the files and folders in the selected directory until the page fills. From this point you can use the up or down arrow to either scroll backwards or forwards, of the page up/page down keys to hurry things up a bit. Pressing q will quite the operation.
Nifty.