How to stop displaying long long file list of `ls`?

Question 1

If you are over SSH, you can use escape sequences. For example to send break, press:

enter, ~ and B

"enter" is of course not typed, just press the enter key (I suppose to "reset" the current command buffer)

Other interesting ones

Terminate time-outing session

enter, ~ and .

Send escape character

enter, ~ and ~

You can list these commands with

enter, ~ and ?

On my system the above prints:

# ~?
Supported escape sequences:
  ~.  - terminate connection (and any multiplexed sessions)
  ~B  - send a BREAK to the remote system
  ~C  - open a command line
  ~R  - Request rekey (SSH protocol 2 only)
  ~^Z - suspend ssh
  ~#  - list forwarded connections
  ~&  - background ssh (when waiting for connections to terminate)
  ~?  - this message
  ~~  - send the escape character by typing it twice
(Note that escapes are only recognized immediately after newline.)

Question 2

You can control the ls output by using less or more command, like below:

ls | more
ls | less

They'll work on interactive way. Or you can truncate output with head or tail command, like:

ls | head
ls | tail

head will show default 10 lines from head and tail will show default 10 lines from tail.

Question 3

You can stop the output by pressing Ctrl + C (like it's the case with most programs inside the linux shell).

Edit: Just read that Ctrl + C is not working. I think simply opening a new console using Alt + F2 doesn't work with Putty either. Then just close the putty window and open a new one. With that, you can kill the process.

To read the output I would suggest using ls | less or pipe the output to a file and then read it ( ls > filelist.txt ).

Question 4

In Putty there is a menu that you can access to sending special commands like break

Question 5

Try switching to UTF-8 if you're using something else, edit /etc/locale.gen commenting out all but the line containing UTF-8 for your location, then run locale-gen to update your system.