One of the features of less is piping the file to be viewed through a filter program (usually called lesspipe.sh) before viewing it. This means that gzipped files can be decompressed, troff source formatted, HTML rendered into plain text, and so on. Typically lesspipe.sh is a shell script which runs different filters depending on the input filename.
The standard distribution of less does not include a lesspipe.sh, but there is one included in the less package from Red Hat (rpmfind.net//linux/RPM...) (and related distributions) and another with Slackware. Wolfgang Friebel's lesspipe.sh (www-zeuthen.desy.de/~f...) is unusual in that it uses file(1) to look at the file's contents.
Comments for Less
lesspipe.sh filters
One of the features of less is piping the file to be viewed through a filter program (usually called lesspipe.sh) before viewing it. This means that gzipped files can be decompressed, troff source formatted, HTML rendered into plain text, and so on. Typically lesspipe.sh is a shell script which runs different filters depending on the input filename.
The standard distribution of less does not include a lesspipe.sh, but there is one included in the less package from Red Hat (rpmfind.net//linux/RPM...) (and related distributions) and another with Slackware. Wolfgang Friebel's lesspipe.sh (www-zeuthen.desy.de/~f...) is unusual in that it uses file(1) to look at the file's contents.