Everyone who works with databases on a linux terminal faces this issue at some point in time — executing select * on a table with too many columns. And in linux since there is no horizontal scrolling, the output is wrapped and hence completely unusable.

You can use

--pager

property to get rid of that text wrap.

Option 1

mysql -u<username> -p --pager="less -S" <database>

Option 2

Install a program known as “most”

sudo apt-get install most

And use this to invoke your mysql client

mysql -u<username> -p --pager="most" <database>

most is easier to use then less -S and the shortcuts makes it a breeze to run through all the data.

Note – Look the the bottom of the screen while running most to see Options or just read the man page.

If you any other option for viewing data on a terminal let us know!