ZLESS(1) User Commands ZLESS(1)

NAME

zless - file perusal filter for crt viewing of compressed text

SYNOPSIS

zless [ name ... ]

DESCRIPTION

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.

SEE ALSO

zmore(1), less(1)

BUGS

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.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE

Copyright (C) 2006-2007, 2015-2023 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Copyright (C) 1992, 1993 Jean-loup Gailly

Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this
manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are
preserved on all copies.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of
this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that
the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a
permission notice identical to this one.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this
manual into another language, under the above conditions for modified
versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in a
translation approved by the Foundation.

ZLESS(1)