In Unix, there’s a command to display text in your command window. It’s called “more”. If you wanted to show the contents of a file called ittybittyfile.txt in your terminal window, you’d enter “more ittybittyfile.txt” and you’d see the contents in all of their glory.

A few years after “more” got popular, some developer decided to write an improved version of “more” and he figured that it’d be brilliant to call this “less”. Now if you wanted to show the contents of ittybittyfile.txt in your terminal window, you’d enter “less ittybittyfile.txt”.

Some folks who manage unix software really enjoyed the improvements of “less” over “more” and figured that they’d include both commands for their customers. As time passed, someone figured that it’d be easier to set up an alias of “more” so that whenever someone tried to use the “more” command, “less” would be invoked instead.

I was explaining this to some teammates the other day, ending with “so more is really less”.

Then I realized what I’d said. FML