Fedora :: "less" Command Lists Contents Of (compressed) Archive Files?

I came across this feature of the "less" command today. It appears not to be well-documented so I'll share it here. I found that "less" can automatically uncompress compressed files - no need to run the first command, the second does the same job:

Code:

gunzip -c textfile.gz | less
less textfile.gz

Even better, "less" can read and list the contents of some archive files as well, including Tar files compressed using Gzip and Bzip2 as well as Zip files. So now when I want to list the contents of an archive,for example to determine whether the contents will be extracted to an absolute path or relative to the working directory, the following work

Code:

less archive.tar.gz
less archive.tgz
less archive.tar.bz2
less archive.zip

Much easier than remembering the various options that the Tar, Gzip, Bzip2 and Zip use. The best one for me is with RPM archives:

Code:

less some.rpm

The above outputs the Information, Change Log and verbose File List of the RPM (paging the output, of course!) The following commands (using short and long options) give the equivalent output using the "rpm" command:

Code:

rpm -qilvp --changelog some.rpm | less
rpm --query --info --list --verbose --package --changelog some.rpm | less

"less" does not recognise the initramfs file produced by "dracut" (which is a compressed "cpio" archive), but I suppose you can't have everything ...