Chad C. Walstrom writes:
>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
zless is a keystroke saver, but it only handles "*.gz" files. With
the preprocessor feature of less it can be made to handle *.deb, *.bz2
and other compression types as well. A "lesspipe" script has been
attached that can do these. Thus typing
less <package>.deb
will list the contents of the deb package. You will need to define
the environmental variable "LESSOPEN", i.e., for csh|tcsh
setenv LESSOPEN "| ~/bin/lesspipe %s"
Of course "lesspipe" must be made excutable.
>
>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
>Key fingerprint = B4AB D627 9CBD 687E 7A31 1950 0CC7 0B18 206C 5AFD
>
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--
Carl Greco
cgreco@novia.net