Re: [PLUG] Doing More with Less

[Walt Mankowski <waltman@pobox.com>]

On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 11:14:35PM -0400, JP Vossen wrote:
> Last night at PLUG W Amul & I and others were talking about using
> 'less' and extending it to read "binary" stuff like zip or tar
> files.
> 
> You can see what I wrote in the _bash Cookbook_ here:
> http://books.google.com/books?id=Qu6H8fnAvGoC&pg=PA182&lpg=PA182&dq=%22you%27d+like+to+take+better+advantage+of+the+features+of+the+less+pager%22&;
> 
> But the short answer is see if 'lesspipe' is already installed
> (which it may already be via the Ubuntu "less" package, other
> distros vary), and either way go read:
> http://www-zeuthen.desy.de/~friebel/unix/lesspipe.html.

I've always used zless(1), which comes in Debian's gzip package, for
that.  But its manpage says

  Less now provides similar, and more flexible, functionality through
  the lessfile and lesspipe filters.

I don't recall ever needing more flexibility or functionality than
what zless provides, but I'll check out lesspipe anyway to see how it
works.

Thanks!

Walt

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