MySQL Paging Lots of Results

I’ve recently moved to using the terminal program alacritty, which does not natively do paging. This is not generally a problem since I can pipe results to less.

$ ls dir-w-lots-of-files | less

However, I found myself working in command line MySQL and I got LOTS of results but could not page back.

It turns out you can set a pager in MySQL. Running the command pager less, sets less to be the pager.

MySQL> pager less

Now, I can get lots of results and review them with the standard less commands (including search).

Note: I’ve gone back to using iTerm but I still find using the pager in MySQL helpful at times.

Sal Ferrarello (@salcode)

Sal is a PHP developer with a focus on the WordPress platform. He is a conference speaker with a background including Piano Player, Radio DJ, Magician/Juggler, Beach Photographer, and High School Math Teacher. Sal can be found professionally at WebDevStudios, where he works as a senior backend engineer.