zless

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 stan-
       dard 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, 2015-2018 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 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 man-
       ual into another language, under the above conditions for modified ver-
       sions,  except  that this permission notice may be stated in a transla-
       tion approved by the Foundation.

                                                                      ZLESS(1)