zless

Page through a gzip compressed file with less

$ zless [file.txt.gz]

zless [ name ... ]

The zless command 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.

The zless command 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.

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Copyright © 1992, 1993 Jean-loup Gailly

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zmore(1), less(1)