ZLESS(1)                                                              ZLESS(1)



NAME
       zless  -  file  perusal  filter  for crt viewing of com-
       pressed 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 then running less.  However, enough people  seem  to
       think  that having the command zless available is impor-
       tant to be worth providing it.

       Note that zless does not work with files piped to it  on
       stdin,  it only works with files specified as arguments.
       If you really want to use less in a pipe,  then  do  the
       uncompress explicitly and pipe to less instead of zless.

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.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE
       Copyright (C) 2006 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 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  transla-
       tions  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)
