More
Sir Thomas More (7 February 1478 – 6 July 1535) was an English Renaissance humanist, lawyer, philosopher, and statesman renowned for his intellectual contributions and principled resistance to royal overreach.[1] Born in London to a prominent legal family, he rose through education at Oxford and the Inns of Court to become a judge, member of Parliament, and ultimately Lord Chancellor of England from 1529 to 1532, the highest secular office after the king.[2] More's most enduring achievement is his 1516 Latin treatise Utopia, which satirically depicts an imaginary island society with communal property, religious tolerance, and rational governance to critique European vices like enclosure and corruption, influencing later political thought while embodying humanist ideals of reform through reason.[3] As chancellor, he vigorously enforced anti-heresy laws, prosecuting Lutheran reformers—a role reflecting his devout Catholicism but drawing modern criticism for intolerance, though contemporary accounts emphasize his fairness in judicial matters.[4] His defining stand came during Henry VIII's break with Rome: More resigned over the king's divorce and refused the 1534 oath affirming royal supremacy in the Church, leading to his imprisonment in the Tower of London and execution by beheading for treason under a parliamentary act, an act he viewed as violating conscience and natural law.[5][2] Canonized by the Catholic Church in 1935 alongside John Fisher, More exemplifies the tension between personal integrity and state power, with his writings and martyrdom underscoring a commitment to moral absolutes amid Reformation upheavals.[6]Computing
Command-line pager
Themore command is a pager utility in Unix-like operating systems designed to display the contents of text files or piped output one screenful at a time, pausing to allow user navigation through large inputs that would otherwise scroll off the terminal. It originated as a simple replacement for earlier pagination methods like the cr3 script, which relied on terminal bells that failed on muted or slow systems.[7]
Developed in 1978 by Daniel C. Halbert, a first-year graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, on the institution's initial VAX Unix system, more drew inspiration from the Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS) at MIT, which used a "--MORE--" prompt and spacebar continuation for file output.[7] Halbert's initial implementation printed "--More--" at the screen bottom after each page, accepted spacebar input to advance, and supported multiple filenames, addressing limitations in terminal handling for ADM-3/ADM-3A devices common at Berkeley.[7] Subsequent enhancements by Eric Shienbrood and Geoff Peck added command-line options, such as specifying starting lines or suppressing pauses for short files, before its inclusion in 3.0 BSD in 1979.[7]) This evolution prioritized forward pagination efficiency over complex editing, reflecting the era's focus on terminal-based workflows with constrained hardware.
Core functionality centers on sequential forward navigation: the spacebar advances one full screen, the Enter key scrolls one line, and lowercase 'q' or Ctrl+C quits; limited backward movement via 'b' became available in later versions but requires buffering the entire file, unlike pure forward mode.[8] Options like -n for line-numbered output or +num to start at a specific line enable scripting integration, while piping support (e.g., ls -l | more) extends it to command output. In contrast to the less pager, which permits full bidirectional scrolling, searching, and vi-like keybindings without full-file loading, more emphasizes simplicity and lower memory footprint, originally lacking reverse capabilities to avoid overhead on resource-limited systems.[9]
Widely adopted in BSD distributions and ported to Linux via GNU coreutils, more achieved standardization in POSIX.1-2008, ensuring portability across compliant systems like Solaris, macOS, and embedded environments.[10] Its persistence stems from empirical advantages in server scripting and minimal-resource terminals, where graphical alternatives consume more CPU and memory; for instance, it processes streams without unnecessary buffering, outperforming feature-rich pagers in high-throughput logging scenarios.[11] Despite less often aliasing more in modern shells for enhanced usability, more's lightweight design retains utility in constrained or automated contexts, as evidenced by its default presence in distributions like Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux as of 2023.[12]