less, lessecho and lesskey The less program is a file pager (or text viewer). It displays the contents of a file with the ability to scroll. Less is an improvement on the common pager called more. Less has the ability to scroll backwards through files as well and it doesn't need to read the entire file when it starts, which makes it faster when reading large files. lessecho is needed to expand metacharacters, such as * and ?, in filenames on Unix systems. lesskey is used to specify key bindings for less.