Converts many file formats to text with coloured or enhanced display,
so their contents or useful information about their contents can be shown.
See the less(1) man page section INPUT PREPROCESSOR.
The input filter is a bash script, which also works under zsh, and is
easily extensible for new formats.
Tab completion mechanisms for archive contents are provided for bash and zsh.
Also works with git version control, mutt mail client, vim text editor.
Can handle a wide variety of file formats, even files compressed and
contained in a hierarchy of archives, enabling users to deeply inspect
archives, and display the contents of files in archives without having
to unpack them.
Converters are checked for and used if available, including Cygwin packages:
antiword MS Word files
binutils text strings in binary files or archives
brotli compressed files or archives
bsdtar archive files
bzip2 compressed files or archives
cabextract MS Cabinet files
catdoc MS Word files
cpio archive files
djvulibre DjVu files
ffmpeg multimedia files
genisoimage ISO files or images
ghostscript PS files
groff man pages or Unix source documents
gzip compressed files or archives
hdf5 HDF v5 files
id3v2 media files
ImageMagick image files
jq JSON data files
libiconv character set code page conversion
lynx HTML files
lz4 compressed files or archives
lzip compressed files or archives
mediainfo multimedia files
netcdf nc4 NetCDF files
odt2txt OpenDocument files
openssl Digital Security Certificates
p7zip archive files
perl-Image-ExifTool media files
poppler PDF files
python39-pygments program source code files
rpm RPM files
source-highlight program source code files
texlive TeX files
unrtf RTF files
unzip zip files
util-linux tabular data files
w3m HTML files
wordview MS Office files
writerperfect MS Office files
wv MS Word files
xlsx2csv MS Excel files
xz compressed files or archives
zstd compressed files or archives.
To use these, select them for install in the Cygwin Setup program.
For more information see the project home pages:
https://www-zeuthen.desy.de/~friebel/unix/lesspipe.html
https://github.com/wofr06/lesspipe
It may be enabled by running interactively:
$ eval `/usr/bin/lesspipe.sh`
or adding to a login profile the command:
eval $(/usr/bin/lesspipe.sh)
The following package has been upgraded in the Cygwin distribution:
- lesspipe 2.21
For changes cince the previous Cygwin release see below, or
after installation read /usr/share/doc/lesspipe/ChangeLog:
https://github.com/wofr06/lesspipe/blob/lesspipe/ChangeLog
2025-11-24 2.21
- fix display of text format audio or video files (e.g. m3u)
- remove support for colorizing log files (slow, +F not working)
- update documentation for changed configure options and file names
- update pem recoginition with newer magic file
- remove mdcat for markdown, .lessfilter example in man page changed
- update license information
- more robust parsing in archive_color
- better support for zlib file formats using 7z (dmg files), pigz or zlib-flate
- fix: get command line parameters of less when input to less is from a pipe
- show original file if LESSOPEN starts with || and the filtered output is empty
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