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 argu‐
       ments.   To read compressed data from a pipe, you can use ...|gun‐
       zip|less instead of ...|zless.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE
       Copyright © 2006-2007, 2015-2018 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 verbatim 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 modi‐
       fied versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in
       a translation approved by the Foundation.

                                                                 ZLESS(1)