I'm taking an Intro to Linux class in college. Our teacher wants us to show a command that can be used for this question:Display the contents of a file with paging control that provides line-by-line navigation.He said the only correct answer is less. But can't less and more both operate in the same way? You can go line-by-line (Enter) or page-by-page (Space) with both correct? Edit:Sorry. I guess I should have just asked if more and less (sorry I'm not sure how to format these words and images as other posters do) can operate relatively the same way in that they can both go through a file or directory line-by-line or page-by-page (screenful at a time). They either can or they can't I would assume.From my experience, reading (I have a Linux+ book that also states they can both operate the same), and comments like Anthony's, it appears that they do both operate in that way. I basically just came to this forum since I think the teacher is giving out bad information and wanted advice from more experienced users than I. If this does stay closed, I'd just like to thank everyone who commented. I appreciate it.
Using More or Less in this Scenario
less;more
I dont think the teachers question is particularly useful for someone learning Unix  and their expected answer even less so. The less utility is widely used on modern Unix-like operating systems but its not actually mandated by POSIX. On the other hand, the more utility is specified by POSIX  and this specification includes line-by-line navigation.POSIX describes more as a utility to display files on a page-by-page basis but its Extended description describes line-by-line navigation features, e.g., Scroll Forward One Line.  For what its worth, any implementation of more that Ive personally used only allowed pressing Enter to scroll forward one line at a time (so not fully POSIX compliant).Note that on some systems, more can be symbolically linked to the less executable. In this case, less emulates the more command (as specified by POSIX). You might think youre running more  but in reality, youre running less (this emulation can also be achieved by setting the environment variable LESS_IS_MORE to 1).  You can tell if youre really running less in this compatibility mode by pressing -V, i.e., - followed by ShiftV while viewing a file. This prints the version number of less if running in less, e.g., less 481 while in (most implementations of) more, it will do nothing.