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ZLESS(1)                                       General Commands Manual                                       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 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
       Zless  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 © 2006, 2007 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 preserved on all copies.

       Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for  verba‐
       tim  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.



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