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 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)