Take the 2-minute tour ×  How can I scroll up or pause the
terminal so I can read text before it goes too far up?
share|improve this question add comment  3 Answers  up vote 3
down vote accepted  You can hold down shift and use Page up and
Page down to scroll.  You can also pipe the results to less (eg
ls -al | less) or send a copy of the output to a text file with
tee (eg ls -al | tee filelist.txt).  share|improve this answer
add comment  You can temporarily pause your program by pressing
Ctrl-Z. This will put your program to sleep, obviously stopping
any output. The you can bring it back to the foreground with fg.
share|improve this answer add comment  Often Ctrl-S and Ctrl-Q
can be used to pause/resume terminal output.  share|improve this
answer caveat: Ctrl-S is usually used in bash readline as
'forward-search-history'. This may or may not work. –  Rich
Homolka Aug 5 '10 at 18:11 @Rich: When a foreground process is
running, readline is inactive and the terminal is reconfigured
to pause on ^S. –  grawity