ZLESS(1) General Commands Manual 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. How-
ever, enough people seem to think that having the command zless avail-
able 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 argu-
ments. To read compressed data from a pipe, you can use ...|gunzip|less
instead of ...|zless.
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
Copyright © 2006-2007, 2015-2023 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Copyright © 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 pre-
served on all copies.
Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this
manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the en-
tire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permis-
sion 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 ap-
proved by the Foundation.
ZLESS(1)
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