"Git Log" command in Powershell - unable to terminate process

Question

When I type git log in PowerShell it prints what looks like a normal response.

But at the bottom it doesn't show the normal working directory that prompts me for a new command, it just shows : (a colon) and no command works; not quit, not ctrl z, not ctrl c, it just prints another colon.

Answer 1

It puts you in a pager (most probably less if you installed MSysGit or Github for Windows), because the output you requested is longer than one screen page.

You can scroll up/down/left/right with your arrow keys, the Page Up/Page Down keys and the J/K/H/L keys.

To show inline help, press ? and to quit, press Q.

You can use a different pager or turn it off if you want to. As man git config points out, you can use the core.pager setting to set it to a different pager, or set its value to cat to disable pagination for all Git commands.

Answer 2

If the pager is killed using Ctrl-C then the pager keeps running in the background and on each newline in terminal it will print a line and (END). So far I have not found a way of saving such a terminal. When I exit the terminal, the pager still keeps it alive until I kill the window.

q works to exit the pager / less-command if Ctrl-C has not been used.