Pádraig Brady wrote: > Alfred M. Szmidt wrote: > > You can use: zcat foo.gz | head > > Or more generally: gzip -fdc "$file" | head > The issue with that is that one can't pass multiple files > to `head` and get a ==> filename <== inserted.
The markers seem mostly intended for interactive use. For interactive use I much prefer 'less'. (Or one can use 'more' or 'most'.) With a 'less' input processor specified in LESSOPEN it makes this very convenient to open any of a number of different types of files. $ less foo.gz $ less foo1.gz foo2.gz foo3 foo4.bz2 There has been recent discussion about 'zutils' a project to host the entire class of decompressors. If a 'zhead' were suggested then it should go into the 'zutils' project. But there doesn't seem to be a need for it. Bob
