## 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>;*?"()<>[|&^`#e$%=~', 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

instead of

## COPYRIGHT NOTICE

Copyright © 2006, 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Copyright © 1992, 1993 Jean-loup Gailly

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