most is a paging program that displays, one windowful at a time, the contents of a file on a terminal. It pauses after each windowful and prints on the window status line the screen the file name, current line number, and the percentage of the file so far displayed.
Unlike other paging programs, most is capable of displaying an arbitrary number of windows as long as each window occupies at least two screen lines. Each window may contain the same file or a different file. In addition, each window has its own mode. For example, one window may display a file with its lines wrapped while another may be truncating the lines. Windows may be `locked' together in the sense that if one of the locked windows scrolls, all locked windows will scroll. most is also capable of ignoring lines that are indented beyond a user specified value. This is useful when viewing computer programs to pick out gross features of the code. See the `:o' command for a description of this feature.

In addition to displaying ordinary text files, most can also display binary files as well as files with arbitrary ascii characters. When a file is read into a buffer, most examines the first 32 bytes of the file to determine if the file is a binary file and then switches to the appropriate mode. However, this feature may be disabled with the -k option. See the description of the -b, -k, -v, and -t options for further details.