On Fri, Feb 23, 2001 at 01:32:41PM -0300, Marcelo Chiapparini wrote:
> this is a very elemental question: how can I read a text file which
> is gzipped? Al documentation files are stored in this way... eg
> README.gz
Why do people suggest using things like mc(1)? What if Marcelo hasn't
installed midnight commander? Let's instead suggest he learns about
the tools on the system instead of learning about crutches such as mc.
Marcelo, *.gz files are compressed files created with the gzip(1)
tool. When you see people referring to an application like I referred
to gzip above, it means that there is a manpage -- aka manual page --
available. You can view the manpage with the man(1) command.
Now, go take a look at gzip(1), as gunzip(1) shows you the same
manpage. gunzip is a simple "wrapper" for
bash$ gzip -cd <file.gz>
The nice thing about shells and UNIX in general is that you can
redirect the input into pager's you're familiar with, such as more(1),
less(1), most(1), or even vi(1), my favorite editor.
bash$ gzip -cd file.gz | more
Notice the pipe ('|'). You can read about redirection of standard
input (stdin), standard output (stdout), and standard error (stderr),
in the manpage for the shell that you are using. Debian installs with
bash(1) as your default shell, so that would be a good place to start.
Someone mentioned the use of zless. This is a way of calling less(1),
a popular pager, to automatically decompress the file. Essentially,
zless does the following:
bash$ gzip -cd file.gz | less
Cool, huh? Say you want to email someone the uncompressed version of
that file. Given that you've set up sendmail(1), smail(1), or other
Mail Transfer Agent (MTA). You can do stuff like this:
bash$ gzip -cd file.gz | mailx -s 'Here is the file...' friend@there.com
And thus you see the beauty of the UNIX philosophy: "Everything is a
filter."
The next place for you to look for information is in the document
directories:
/usr/share/doc/<package>
So go look there for stuff on: gzip, more, less, bash, etc...
Have fun!
--
Chad Walstrom <chewie@wookimus.net> | a.k.a. ^chewie
http://www.wookimus.net/ | s.k.a. gunnarr
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