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The development version can be cloned using git: git clone https://github.com/wofr06/lesspipe.git To report bugs or make proposals to improve lesspipe please contact the author by email.
For the text and info extraction, lesspipe.sh will depend on external tools, but many use cases are covered by an installation of
To browse files under UNIX the excellent viewer less [1] can be used. By setting the environment variable LESSOPEN, less can be enhanced by external filters to become even more powerful. Most Linux distributions come already with a "lesspipe.sh" that covers the most common situations.
The input filter for less described here is called "lesspipe.sh". It is able to process a wide variety of file formats. It enables users to deeply inspect archives and to display the contents of files in archives without having to unpack them before. That means file contents can be properly interpreted even if the files are compressed and contained in a hierarchy of archives (often found in RPM or DEB archives containing source tarballs). The filter is easily extensible for new formats.
The filter does different things depending on the file format. In most cases it is determined on the output of the file --mime command [2], that returns the mime type. In some cases the mime type is too unspecific and then the file command yielding a textual description or the file suffix is used to determine what to display.
