XZLESS(1)

📦 version 5.8.4, in alpine 3.22, alpine 3.23, alpine 3.24, arch rolling, nixpkgs unstable, opensuse-leap 16.0, ubuntu questing

💖 XZLESS(1) 💖

✨ NAME ✨

okay bestie, the manual name is xzless, and lzless is its older twin 🎀 The whole page is about viewing xz or lzma compressed (text) files 📖

🫶 SYNOPSIS 🫶

xzless [file...]
lzless [file...]  (DEPRECATED)

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

okay so xzless is a filter that shows you the text inside compressed files right in your terminal 💅 Anything xz(1) can decompress gets unzipped for you. Anything else is treated like it's already uncompressed, no drama 🦋 If you don't give it any files, xzless reads from standard input instead ✨

xzless uses less(1) to show you the output 👑 Unlike xzmore, you can't change which pager it uses by setting an environment variable, so it's locked in as less 🙈 The commands are a mix of more(1) and vi(1), so you can go back and forth and search around. It's giving power user energy 🔥 For the full tea, check the less(1) manual 📚

The command lzless is only here for backward compatibility with LZMA Utils 🧚 It's deprecated, which means it's on its way out and will be removed in a future version. Use xzless instead, bestie 💜

⚠️ lzless is deprecated and will be removed in a future version. Switch over to xzless before it disappears 💀

🌈 ENVIRONMENT 🌈

💅 LESSMETACHARS

A list of characters that are special to the shell 🐚 xzless sets this for you, but only if it isn't already set in your environment. Your settings win, periodt ✨

🧚 LESSOPEN

Set this to a command line that runs the xz(1) decompressor. It preprocesses the input files before they reach less(1), so the decompressing happens behind the scenes 🎀

🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

less(1), xz(1), xzmore(1), zless(1) 💖

Okay that's the whole tea, bestie 🫶 Written with love by Tukaani on 2025-03-06 🌸 Stay compressed, stay iconic, and I'll see you in the next man page 💅✨

📦 where this page comes from