Good information guys! I knew about less decompression and use that a lot. I should have been clearer that the zcat usage was so I could grep for something in a compressed (and normally large) syslog archive. I like Rusty's explanation of logrotate because I have looked at it in the past and could never make heads or tails of how it worked. I knew the basics of why it existed but not any details. Maybe one of these days when I have nothing else to do I will look at it again :) Larry On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 9:01 AM, Matt Graham wrote: > From: "Carruth, Rusty" > [snip logrotate info] > > On a slightly different topic, I have found that some versions of 'less' > > will automatically decompress compressed files to text. Or at least, > > one time I mistakenly said 'less /var/log/syslog*' when some of them > > were zipped, and LO! I didn't see any binary junk - it decompressed them > > for me. YMMV! > > This is actually found in *all* versions of less, at least since 1999, but > the > environment variable that controls this feature isn't always set. An older > Ubuntu didn't set it, f'rinstance. That's: > > export LESSOPEN='|lesspipe.sh %s' > > ...so less, when invoked, checks that LESSOPEN var and pipes files through > /usr/bin/lesspipe.sh , which checks the filename for a metric ton of common > patterns and attempts to invoke appropriate decompressers for those > patterns. > Like "bzip2 -dc" for files ending in .bz2 , "bzip2 -dc | tar tvvf -" for > files > ending in .tar.bz2 , and so forth. > > -- > Matt G / Dances With Crows > The Crow202 Blog: http://crow202.org/wordpress/ > There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see > > --------------------------------------------------- > PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us > To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: > http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss > -- Dazed_75 a.k.a. Larry Please protect my address like I protect yours. When sending messages to multiple recipients, always use the BCC: (Blind carbon copy) and not To: or CC:. Remove all addresses from the message body before sending a Forwarded message. This can prevent spy programs capturing addresses from the recipient list and message body.