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On my old SUSE distro, less would automatically decompress .gz files.

That came in very convenient when listing auto-compressed /var/log/mail*.gz files.

The current version of SUSE now archives /var/log/mail and others with xz.

I never wondered how less automatically decompressed .gz files, but I probably should have (:

So: what do I need to do, so this "magically" will work:

less /var/log/mail-20130201.xz

I regard this as a Linux question, but in case it is SUSE specific, I'm running this version of SUSE:

openSUSE 12.2 (x86_64)
VERSION = 12.2
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2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

The functionality is provided by lesspipe. Install it and put (I don't have a SUSE machine at the moment to check)

[ -x /usr/bin/lessopen.sh ] && eval /usr/bin/lessopen.sh

in your shell configuration (e.g., .bashrc)

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Thanks. Getting it to install and work was a bit of work, see my own answer. –  Jeroen Wiert Pluimers Mar 3 '13 at 21:31
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Thanks Matteo for pointing me into the right direction.

Getting lesspipe to run on OpenSUSE was a bit of a journey as it is not part of the standard OpenSUSE 12.x repository. You can only get 'unstable' lesspipe packages, of which the Show home:adra / lesspipe - openSUSE Build Service seems to be maintained most frequently.

This is how to install it from there:

zypper addrepo http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:adra/openSUSE_Factory/home:adra.repo
zypper refresh
zypper install lesspipe

I am using the bash shell, so after performing the install, I had to add this line to my my ~/.bashrc

LESSOPEN="|lesspipe.sh %s"; export LESSOPEN
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