in reply to perl OPEN function and zless

Why would you want to read from zless? It's a pager, which is designed to scroll through a gzipped file (on a terminal). Better choices are 'gunzip' or 'zcat' (maybe look at the man pages).

To use these tools with "open", you need to use "-|" rather than "<". perldoc -f open will tell you more about it.

Searching CPAN for gzip might also help. IO::Uncompress::Gunzip is installed with perl by default.

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Re^2: perl OPEN function and zless
by legendx (Acolyte) on Jul 15, 2011 at 15:16 UTC
    Thanks,
    I used this to get it to work:
    open(FILE, '-|', "gunzip -c $filename"); while (FILE) { ..do action.. }