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https://github.com/wofr06/lesspipe
lesspipe - display more with less
https://github.com/wofr06/lesspipe
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lesspipe - display more with less
- Host: GitHub
- URL: https://github.com/wofr06/lesspipe
- Owner: wofr06
- License: gpl-2.0
- Created: 2015-07-20T08:07:36.000Z (about 9 years ago)
- Default Branch: lesspipe
- Last Pushed: 2024-05-22T11:00:49.000Z (4 months ago)
- Last Synced: 2024-05-22T11:42:15.124Z (4 months ago)
- Language: Perl
- Homepage:
- Size: 769 KB
- Stars: 440
- Watchers: 14
- Forks: 49
- Open Issues: 0
-
Metadata Files:
- Readme: README.md
- Changelog: ChangeLog
- License: COPYING
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README
# lesspipe.sh, a preprocessor for less
Version: 2.13
Author : Wolfgang Friebel [[email protected]](mailto://[email protected])
License: GPL
Latest version available as:
[zip file on github](https://github.com/wofr06/lesspipe.sh/archive/lesspipe.zip)
and the [repository on github](https://github.com/wofr06/lesspipe)
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.
## Contents
0. Motivation
1. Introduction
2. Usage
3. Required programs
4. Supported file formats
- Supported compression methods and archive formats
- List of preprocessed file types
- Conversion of files with alternate character encoding
5. Colorizing the output
- Syntax highlighting
- Syntax highlighting choices
- List of supported languages
- Colored Directory listing
- Colored listing of tar file contents
6. Calling less from standard input
7. Displaying files with special characters in the file name
8. Tab completion for zsh and bash
9. User defined filtering
10. Debugging
11. (Old) documentation about lesspipe
12. External links
- URLs to some utilities
- References
13. Contributors
## 0. Motivation
If you use
- the pager `less` in the command line,
- the version control system `git`,
- the text editor `Vim` or
- the mail client `mutt`,
then lesspipe.sh enables these programs to *read* non-text files, such as:
- PDFs,
- (Microsoft or LibreOffice) Office documents, or even
- media (such as JPG or PNG images, MP3 audio or video) files
where *read* means,
- (format and) show the contained text (of a document or tag in a media file),
or
- show sensible file information (such as length of the video).
To enable `less` respectively `git`, `Vim` or `mutt` to read non-text files by
lesspipe.sh, see
- Section 2 on the Usage of lesspipe.sh, respectively
- the Wiki at https://github.com/wofr06/lesspipe/wiki
For the text and info extraction, lesspipe.sh will depend on external tools,
but many use cases are covered by an installation of
- LibreOffice and a common text browser (such as `lynx`),
- pdftotext, and
- mediainfo (or exiftool).
## 1. Introduction
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 input filter which is also called "lesspipe.sh" is a bash script, but
works as well as a zsh script.
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.
By default less wraps long lines unless called with the option -S or
--chop-long-lines. That can be changed interactively by typing -S followed by
ENTER when viewing files with long lines. It is e.g. quite useful for tabular
display of csv files with many columns.
## 2. Usage
(see also the man page lesspipe.1)
To activate lesspipe.sh the environment variable **LESSOPEN** has to be defined
in the following way:
```
LESSOPEN="|lesspipe.sh %s"; export LESSOPEN # (sh like shells)
setenv LESSOPEN "|lesspipe.sh %s" # (csh, tcsh)
```
If `lesspipe.sh` is not in the UNIX search path or if the wrong `lesspipe.sh` is
found in the search path, then the full path to `lesspipe.sh` should be given
in the above commands. The above commands work only in the described manner
if the file name is lesspipe.sh.
If it is installed under a different name then calling it without an argument
will work as a filter with LESSQUIET set and expecting input from STDIN.
The command to set **LESSOPEN** can also be displayed by calling `lesspipe.sh`
without arguments. This can even be used to set **LESSOPEN** directly:
```
eval "$(lesspipe.sh)" # (bash) or
lesspipe.sh | source /dev/stdin # (zsh)
```
As `lesspipe.sh` is accepting only a single argument, a hierarchical list of file
names has to be separated by a non-blank character. A colon is rarely found
in file names, therefore it has been chosen as the separator character. If a
file name does however contain at least one isolated colon, the equal sign =
can be used as an alternate separator character. At each stage in
extracting files from such a hierarchy, the file type is determined. This
guarantees a correct processing and display at each stage of the filtering.
To view files in archives, the following command can be used:
```
less archive_file:contained_file
```
This can be used to extract files from an archive:
```
less archive_file:contained_file > extracted_file
```
For extracting files less is not required, that can be done also using:
```
lesspipe.sh archive_file:contained_file > extracted_file
```
Even a file in an archive, that itself is contained in yet
another archive can be viewed this way:
```
less super_archive:archive_file:contained_file
```
The script is able to extract files up to a depth of 6 where applying a
decompression algorithm counts as a separate level. In a few rare cases, the
file command does not recognize the correct format.
In such cases, the filtering can be suppressed by a trailing colon on the file
name. That can also be used to output the original unmodified file or to
suppress syntax highlighting (see below).
Several environment variables can influence the behavior of lesspipe.sh.
**LESSQUIET** will suppress additional output not belonging to the file contents
if set to a non-empty value.
**LESS** can be used to switch on colored less output (should contain -R).
**LESSCOLORIZER** can be set to prefer a highlighting program from the following
choices (`nvimpager` `bat` `batcat` `pygmentize` `source-highlight` `vimcolor` `code2color`).
Otherwise the first program in that list that is installed will be used.
## 3. Required programs
Most of the programs are checked for its existence before they get called
in lesspipe.sh. However some of the programs are assumed to always be
installed. That is foremost `bash` or `zsh` (have the appropriate first line
in the script), then `file` and other utilities like `cat`,
`grep`, `ln`, `ls`, `mkdir`, `rm`, `strings`, `tar` and `tr`.
For testing lesspipe.sh `perl` is used, that is however not
required in just using `lesspipe.sh`.
## 4. Supported file formats
Currently `lesspipe.sh` [3] supports the following compression methods
and file types (i.e. the file contents gets transformed by `lesspipe.sh`):
### 4.1 Supported compression methods and archive formats
- gzip, compress requires `gzip`
- bzip2 requires `bzip2`
- lzma requires `lzma` or `7z`
- xz requires `xz` or `7z`
- zstd requires `zstd`
- brotli requires `bro`
- lz4 requires `lz4`
- tar requires optionally `archive_color` for coloring
- ar library requires `bsdtar` or `ar`
- zip archive requires `bsdtar` or `unzip`
- jar archive requires `bsdtar` or `unzip`
- rar archive requires `bsdtar` or `unrar` or `rar`
- 7-zip archive requires `7zz` or `7zr` or `7z` or `7za`
- lzip archive requires `lzip`
- iso images requires `bsdtar` or `isoinfo` or `7z`
- rpm requires `rpm2cpio` and `cpio` or `bsdtar`
- Debian requires `bsdtar` or `ar`
- cab requires `cabextract` or `7z`
- cpio requires `cpio` or `bsdtar` or `7z`
- appimage requires `unsquashfs`
- snap requires `snap` and `unsquashfs`
### 4.2 List of preprocessed file types
- directory displayed using `ls -lA`
- nroff(man) requires `groff` or `mandoc`
- shared library requires `nm`
- MS Word (doc) requires `wvText` or `catdoc` or `libreoffice`
- Powerpoint (ppt) requires `catppt`
- Excel (xls) requires `in2csv` (csvkit) or `xls2csv`
- odt requires `pandoc` or `odt2txt` or `libreoffice`
- odp requires `libreoffice`
- ods requires `xlscat` or `libreoffice`
- MS Word (docx) requires `pandoc` or `docx2txt` or `libreoffice`
- Powerpoint (pptx) requires `pptx2md` or `libreoffice`
- Excel (xlsx) requires `in2csv` or `xlscat` or `excel2csv` or `libreoffice`
- csv requires `csvtable` or `csvlook` or `column` or `pandoc`
- rtf requires `unrtf` or `libreoffice`
- epub requires `pandoc`
- html,xml requires one of `xmq`, `w3m`, `lynx`, `elinks` or `html2text`
- pdf requires `pdftotext` or `pdftohtml`
- perl pod requires `pod2text` or `perldoc`
- dvi requires `dvi2tty`
- djvu requires `djvutxt`
- ps requires `ps2ascii` (from the gs package)
- mp3 requires `id3v2`
- multimedia formats requires `mediainfo` or `exiftools`
- image formats requires `mediainfo` or `exiftools` or `identify`
- hdf, nc4 requires `h5dump` or `ncdump` (NetCDF format)
- crt, pem, csr, crl requires `openssl`
- matlab requires `matdump`
- Jupyter notebook requires `pandoc`
- markdown requires `mdcat` or `pandoc`
- log requires `ccze`
- java.class requires `procyon`
- MacOS X plist requires `plistutil`
- binary data requires `strings`
- json requires `jq`
- device tree blobs requires `dtc` (extension dtb or dts)
Files in the html, xml and perl pod format are always rendered. Sometimes
however the original contents of the file should be viewed instead.
That can be achieved by appending a colon to the file name. If the correct
file type (html, xml, pod) follows, the output can get colorized (see also
the section below).
If the binary xmq is installed, then xml is rendered differently, so that
the xml structure is better recognized. A similar display for html contents
using xmq is achieved by appending a colon to the file name. To get the
original html file contents, two colons are required in this case.
### 4.3 Conversion of files with alternate character encoding
If the file utility reports text with an encoding different from the one
used in the terminal, then the text will be transformed using `iconv` into
the default encoding. This does assume the file command gets the file
encoding right, which can be wrong in some situations. An appended colon
to the file name does suppress the conversion.
## 5. Colorizing the output
Syntax highlighting and other methods of colorizing the output
is only activated if the environment variable **LESS** is existing and contains
the option -R (or -r) or less is called with one of these options.
The display of wrapped long lines and moving backward in a file using the
option -r can give weird output and is not recommended. For an explanation see
http://www.greenwoodsoftware.com/less/faq.html#dashr
### 5.1 Syntax highlighting
Syntax highlighting is not always wanted, it can be switched off by
appending a colon after the file name. If the wrong language was chosen
for syntax highlighting or no language was recognized, then the correct
one can be forced by appending a colon and a suffix to the file name as
follows (assuming plfile is a file with perl syntax):
```
less plfile:pl or less plfile:perl (depending on the colorizer)
```
#### 5.1.1 Syntax highlighting choices
The filter is able to do syntax highlighting for a wide variety of file
types. If installed, `nvimpager` is used for coloring the output. If
not, `bat`/`batcat`, `pygmentize`, `source-highlight`, `code2color`
and `vimcolor` are
tried. Among these colorizers a preferred one can be forced for coloring
by setting the ENV variable **LESSCOLORIZER** to the name of the colorizer.
For `pygmentize` and `bat/batcat` a restricted set of options can be added:
```
LESSCOLORIZER='pygmentize -O style=foo'
LESSCOLORIZER='bat --style=foo --theme=bar'
```
Much better syntax highlighting is obtained using the `less` emulation of `vim`:
The editor `vim` comes with a file `less.sh`, e.g. on Ubuntu located in
/usr/share/vim/vimXX/macros (XX being the version number). Assuming that file
location, a function `lessc` (bash, zsh, ksh users)
```
lessc () { /usr/share/vim/vimXX/macros/less.sh "$@"}
```
is defined and `lessc filename` is used to view the colorful file contents.
The same can be achieved using less and `vimcolor`, but that is much slower.
#### 5.1.2 List of supported languages
To see which languages are supported the list can be printed using the
following colorizer commands:
```
bat --list-languages
batcat --list-languages
pygmentize -L lexers
source-highlight --lang-list
code2color -h
vimcolor -L (both for vimcolor and nvimpager)
```
### 5.2 Colored Directory listing
Depending on the operating system ls is called with appropriate options to
produce colored output.
### 5.3 Colored listing of tar file contents
If the executable archive_color is installed, then the listing of tar file
contents is colored in a similar fashion as directory contents.
## 6. Calling less from standard input
Normally `lesspipe.sh` is not called when less is used within a pipe, such as
```
cat somefile | less
```
This restriction is removed when the **LESSOPEN** variable starts with the
characters |- or ||-.
Then the colon notation for extracting and displaying files in archives
does not work. As a way out `lesspipe.sh` analyses the command line and looks
for the last argument given to less. If it starts with a colon, it is
interpreted from `lesspipe.sh` as a continuation of the first parameter.
Examples:
```
cat some_c_file | less - :c # equivalent to less some_c_file:c
cat archive | less - :contained_file # extracts a file from the archive
```
## 7. Displaying files with special characters in the file name
Shell meta characters in file names: space (frequently used in windows
file names),
the characters | & ; ( ) ` < > " ' # ~ = $ * ? [ ] or \\
must be escaped by a \ when used in the shell, e.g. `less a\ b.tar.gz:a\\"b`
will display the file a"b contained in the gzipped tar archive a b.tar.gz.
## 8. Tab completion for zsh and bash
An existing `zsh` completion script has been enhanced to provide tab completion
within archives, similar to what is possible with the `tar` command completion.
A `bash` completion script has been modeled loosely after the `zsh` completion.
In both shells it is now possible to complete contents of archive format files
such as tar, zip, rpm, deb files etc. This works as well in compressed files
(e.g. tar.gz) and in chained archives, e.g.in source rpm files containing
tar.gz files.
To make it work, the script `lesscomplete` has to be executable and must be
found in one of the directories listed in the `$PATH` environment variable.
For zsh the file `_less` has to be stored in one of the directories listed in
`$fpath` or the directory containing `_less` has to be added to `$fpath`, e.g.
by:
```
fpath=(~/zsh_functions $fpath)
```
In bash, the function `less_completion` has to be added to the shell environment
by sourcing the script (e.g. from .bashrc using the correct location):
```
source ~/bash_functions/less_completion
```
The completion mechanism is triggered after entering a colon or an equal sign
as for example in
```
less archive_file: # and then
less archive_file:partial_result
less archive_file:contained_archive: # etc.
```
## 9. User defined filtering
The lesspipe.sh filtering can be replaced or enhanced by a user defined
program. Such a program has to be called either `.lessfilter` (and be placed in
the user's home directory), or `lessfilter` (and be accessible from a directory
mentioned in the environment variable `PATH`).
That program has to be executable and has to end with an exit code 0, if the
filtering was done within that script. Otherwise, a nonzero exit code means
the filtering is left to lesspipe.sh.
This mechanism can be used to add filtering for new formats or e.g. inhibit
filtering for certain file types.
## 10. Debugging
If the script does not work as expected for a given file contents, one could
try to output the commands executed by lesspipe.sh. That is achieved by
```
bash -x lesspipe.sh file_name > /dev/null # or zsh -x
```
It is also possible setting temporarily the **LESSOPEN** variable to e.g.
```
LESSOPEN='|bash -x /usr/local/bin/lesspipe.sh %s'
```
and then use `less` with the file to be displayed. The normal output goes to
STDOUT and the commands executed to STDERR.
## 11. (Old) documentation about lesspipe
In English
- https://ref.web.cern.ch/CERN/CNL/2002/001/unix-less/
- https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/bash-cookbook/0596526784/ch08s15.html
In German:
- german.txt (distributed with lesspipe, not updated)
- https://www.linux-magazin.de/ausgaben/2001/01/bessere-sicht/
- https://www.linux-community.de/ausgaben/linuxuser/2002/04/lesspipe/
- https://www.linux-magazin.de/ausgaben/2022/07/lesspipe-2-0/
## 12. External links
(last checked: Jan 29 2024):
### 12.1 URLs to some utilities (with last known release)
- 7zz https://sourceforge.net/projects/sevenzip/ (2023)
- 7zr (outdated!) https://sourceforge.net/projects/p7zip/ (2016)
- cabextract https://www.cabextract.org.uk/ (2023)
- catdoc,catppt,xls2csv https://www.wagner.pp.ru/~vitus/software/catdoc/ (2016)
- ccze https://github.com/software-revive/ccze-rv (2020)
- csvtable https://github.com/wofr06/csvtable (2024)
- djvutxt https://djvu.sourceforge.net/ (2020)
- docx2txt https://docx2txt.sourceforge.net/ (2014)
- dvi2tty https://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/dviware/dvi2tty/ (2016)
- excel2csv https://github.com/informationsea/excel2csv (2018)
- html2text https://github.com/grobian/html2text (2023)
- id3v2 https://id3v2.sourceforge.net/ (2010)
- lzip https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/lzip.html (2024)
- matdump https://sourceforge.net/projects/matio/ (2023)
- mediainfo https://mediaarea.net/MediaInfo/ (2023)
- odt2txt https://github.com/dstosberg/odt2txt (2017)
- pandoc https://pandoc.org/ (2023)
- pptx2md https://github.com/ssine/pptx2md (2023)
- tarcolor https://github.com/msabramo/tarcolor (2014)
- archive_color modified version of tarcolor (contained in this package)
- unrtf https://www.gnu.org/software/unrtf/ (2018)
- wvText https://github.com/AbiWord/wv/ (2014)
- xlscat https://metacpan.org/pod/Spreadsheet::Read (2024)
- sxw2txt https://vinc17.net/software/sxw2txt (2010)
- dtc https://git.kernel.org/cgit/utils/dtc/dtc.git (2023)
- xmq https://github.com/libxmq/xmq/releases/latest (2024)
- nvimpager https://github.com/lucc/nvimpager (2025)
### 12.2 References
- [1] http://www.greenwoodsoftware.com/less/ (less)
- [2] http://www.darwinsys.com/file/ (file)
- [3] https://github.com/wofr06/lesspipe
- [5] http://www.palfrader.org/code2html/ (code2html)
## 13. Contributors
The script lesspipe.sh is constantly enhanced by suggestions from users and
reporting bugs or deficiencies. Thanks to (in alphabetical order):
(contributors after Sep 2015 see github history)
Marc Abramowitz, James Ahlborn, Sören Andersen, Andrew Barnert,
Peter D. Barnes, Jr., Eduard Bloch, Mathieu Bouillaguet, Florian Cramer,
Philippe Defert, Antonio Diaz Diaz, Bastian Fuchs, Matt Ghali, Carl Greco,
Stephan Hegel, Michel Hermier, Tobias Hoffmann, Christian Höltje,
Jürgen Kahnert, Sebastian Kayser, Ben Kibbey, Peter Kostka,
Heinrich Kuettler, Antony Lee, Vincent Lefèvre, David Leverton, Jay Levitt,
Vladimir Linek, Oliver Mangold, Istvan Marko, Markus Meyer, Remi Mommsen,
Derek B. Noonburg, Martin Otte, Jim Pryor, Slaven Rezic, Daniel Risacher,
Jens Schleusener, Ken Teague, Matt Thompson, Paul Townsend, Petr Uzel,
Chelban Vasile, Götz Waschk, Michael Wiedmann, Dale Wijnand, Peter Wu.