Pacman Query: Bounding Output and Paginating Long Package Lists

In Arch Linux, the pacman -Q command lists all installed packages. When the system hosts hundreds of packages, the output scrolls too fast for manual inspection, especially in minimal or headless environments where external pagers such as less may not be present.

The current pacman documentation offers formatting flags (--quiet, --info) but no built‑in mechanism to bound the result set or paginate the output. Community discussions have suggested a hypothetical --limit or --paginate option, yet no consensus exists on whether pacman should provide this directly or rely on shell pipelines.

Given this gap, users must decide how to inspect large package lists efficiently while respecting minimal system constraints.

1. Does pacman support any undocumented flag to limit or paginate the result of -Q?
2. Should pagination be implemented by pacman itself, or is it acceptable to delegate it to external tools like less or more?
3. What is the most reliable approach to view a subset of the package list in a minimal Arch environment?