ZLESS(1)                                                                                                                ZLESS(1)



NAME
       zless - file perusal filter for crt viewing of compressed text

SYNOPSIS
       zless [ name ...  ]

DESCRIPTION
       Zless  is a filter which allows examination of compressed or plain text files one screenful at a time on a soft-copy ter-
       minal.  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
       Zless does not work with compressed data that is piped to it via standard input; it requires that input files  be  speci-
       fied as arguments.  To read compressed data from a pipe, you can use ...|gunzip|less instead of ...|zless.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE
       Copyright (C) 2006, 2007 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 per-
       mission 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  condi-
       tions  for  modified  versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in a translation approved by the Founda-
       tion.



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