Manpages - zless.1

zless - file perusal filter for crt viewing of compressed text

zless [ name … ]

The zless command is a filter which allows examination of compressed or plain text files one screenful at a time on a soft-copy terminal. It is the equivalent of setting the environment variable LESSOPEN to '|gzip -cdfq – %s', and the environment variable LESSMETACHARS to '<space><tab><newline>;*?"()<>[|&^`#\$%=~', and then running less. However, enough people seem to think that having the command zless available is important to be worth providing it.

*zmore*(1), *less*(1)

The zless command does not work with compressed data that is piped to it via standard input; it requires that input files be specified as arguments. To read compressed data from a pipe, you can use . . .*|gunzip|less* instead of . . .*|zless*.

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Copyright © 1992, 1993 Jean-loup Gailly

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