.TH ZLESS 1
.SH NAME
zless \- file perusal filter for crt viewing of compressed text
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B zless
[ name ...  ]
.SH DESCRIPTION
.I  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
.IR less .
However, enough people seem to think that having the
command
.I zless
available is important to be worth providing it.
.SH "SEE ALSO"
zmore(1), less(1)
.SH "BUGS"
.I 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
.RB ".\|.\|." "|gunzip|less"
instead of
.RB ".\|.\|." "|zless" .
.SH "COPYRIGHT NOTICE"
Copyright \(co 2006, 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
.br
Copyright \(co 1992, 1993 Jean-loup Gailly
.PP
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.
.ig
Permission is granted to process this file through troff and print the
results, provided the printed document carries copying permission
notice identical to this one except for the removal of this paragraph
(this paragraph not being relevant to the printed manual).
..
.PP
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.
.PP
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.