"David G. Johnston" <david.g.johnston@gmail.com> writes:
> Whether the pager is used is conditioned on actual output data.
IIRC, you can do "\pset pager always" if you want the pager to be
invoked regardless of the query output length.
Be aware though that the default pager is "more", which (at least
on my Linux box) silently does nothing special if the output is less
than a screenful. If the behavior you are looking for is "wait for
a keystroke even after very short output", you'd need to combine the
\pset setting with "export PSQL_PAGER=less" or similar.
regards, tom lane
