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 arguments.  To read compressed data  from  a  pipe,  you  can  use  ...|gunzip|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 modified versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in a translation
       approved by the Foundation.

                                                                                                        ZLESS(1)