**************************************************************************** # ChangeLog for lesspipe.sh # **************************************************************************** Version 2.18 Feb 16 2025 - short article 25 years recursive lesspipe in the lesspipe.sh wiki (en and de) - document install in user space, do no longer mention (t)csh in documentation - added xlsx2csv to first convert xlsx to csv and then display the csv content - added optional minimal version check for external commands Version 2.17 Dec 22 2024 - evaluation of current locale changed (compatible with old bash versions) - correct typo in xlsx files handling Version 2.16 Nov 10 2024 - security fix: check file name if used with ar - add --ansi to mdcat (fixes #48) - improved recognition of appimage files Version 2.15 Oct 03 2024 - improved parsing of bat/batcat options in LESSCOLORIZE - display all certificates in pem files, not only the 1st one - do not exit if called from other programs (man, git, perldoc) - improve option processing in bat - change (again) order of programs to process man pages - force unicode/utf8 for html2text Version 2.14 Aug 16 2024 - allow for colorizing dotfiles - add nvimpager as (preferred) colorizer - if installed use nvim instead of vim for coloring with vimcolor - prefer bat styles and themes from ENV or command line over config file Version 2.13 May 10 2024 - added support for appimage and snap files - respect color scheme setting of vim in vimcolor, add listing of file types - improve xml (and html) display using the xmq binary - fix color detection (-R) again - support for cpio archives - fall back to 7z for supported formats Version 2.12 Mar 18 2024 - improve completion for file names with special chars - better output when using xlscat - respect bat options from LESSCOLORIZER - propagate lesspipe changes to lesscomplete - don't use antiword any longer, outdated - use 7zip instead of now outdated p7zip if available - propagate file extension to newly created temporary files - use again csvlook for display of csv files if available - use csvtable for tabular display of csv files, needs Text::CSV from perl Version 2.11 Dec 13 2023 - fix output of archive listings when no coloring is requested - column does not accept std input - fix html output with html2text - correct location of bash completion directory - respect csv file extension Version 2.10 Oct 05 2023 - column does not accept -o option (BSD systems) - respect jsx and tsx file extension Version 2.09 Oct 03 2023 - preferred display of csv files is through the program column - language recognition for bat improved - correctly recognize the -r or -R option when calling less - support for plain zlib files(used e.g. in backuppc, pdf) - fix jsx and tsx files often detected as html Version 2.08 Jun 26 2023 - protect file names in tar from being used as options - support the device tree blob file format - many changes for colored output - fix template for creating a lesspipe rpm - fix vimcolor hang due to wrong vim CLI arguments - increase the file portion to read from STDIN to recognize its type - do not call mediainfo on STDIN input Version 2.07 Jan 10 2023 - man page updates - support for displaying mail messages - set theme=ansi and style=plain in bat if not specified elsewhere - correct typo in less option, recognize osascript as applescript - better display of json files using jq - allow for changing the output style in bat/batcat Version 2.06 Aug 17 2022 - remove perl storable (pst) files interpretation (security fix) - let bat recognize language, unless explicitly requested - call the bat colorizer with style=plain - many changes from ShellCheck for better syntax - run ShellCheck and test suite in GitHub Actions - better recognition of hdf and matlab files Version 2.05 Apr 26 2022 - better colorize handling for bat and file names containing spaces - fix handling of pst (perl dump) files Version 2.04 Feb 28 2022 - lessfilter can be in PATH or in homedir - csv format files get displayed in tabular form - do call ccze, mdcat only, if less accepts color seququences (-R) Version 2.03 Feb 22 2022 - fix colorize handling for code2color and vimcolor - better argument parsing to detect -R option for less - use tr to convert into lower case, test string adjustments Version 2.02 Jan 19 2022 - handle files names with a question mark in w3m, prefer elinks over w3m - add again perl storable support - add ~/.lessfilter support - better rpm handling, documentation enhancements - remove contrib directory, patches are partly implemented or obsolete Version 2.01 Jan 4 2022 - experimental zsh and bash completion for archive contents - remove use of rpmunpack, dpkg - minor fixes in test suite and empty file handling Version 2.00 Dec 28 2021 - code cleanup, minor fixes, support pygmentize with 256 color terminals Version 2.00-beta Dec 22 2021 - much enhanced testsuite, can now select tests based on its number etc. - added better bsdtar handling from the contributed bsdtar patch (Jim Pryor) - added -layout option to pdftotext (Sergio Callegari) - changed code for extraction of less calling parameters - don't engage lesspipe in pipes (LESSPIPE=|-...), if called from man and perldoc - iconv handles most conversions from non foreign encodings - tarcolor enhanced and renamed to archive_color, archive listings colorizations Version 2.00-alpha Dec 8 2021 - complete rewrite with many fixes and enhancements. - incompatible change: groff converts to utf8, not 'latin1' and not 'nippon' - incompatible change: do not detect perl storable file format - incompatible change: LESS_ADVANCED_PREPROCESSOR no longer honored - support for growing files and calling less from a filter (LESSOPEN=|-...) - new testsuite test.pl Version 1.91 Nov 10 2021 - testsuite works, most files get colored properly Version 1.90 Oct 6 2021 - make all tests in the test suite work Version 1.89 Sep 18 2021 - attempts to make colorization work and pass tests in the testsuite Version 1.88 Sep 18 2021 - add support for mp4 files and Jupiter notebook formats Version 1.87 Aug 7 2021 - fix broken media file display (#54) - fix broken archive display (#57) - fix version number in files (#50) Version 1.86 Jul 21 2021 - force html2text to use UTF8 instead of ASCII - fix pdf file type display Version 1.85 Aug 25 2020 - improved MS office files handling and bug fixes Version 1.84 Jul 7 2019 - support for brotli, several MS Office files and media files Version 1.83 Jul 28 2015 - shortcut for unreadable files, prefer pdftotext over pdftohtml (Peter Wu) - add bsdtar as a command to unpack rar files (coadde) - add support for NetCDF and HDF5 files using ncdump, h5dump (Matt Thompson) - correctly display directories with a colon in the name (Oliver Mangold) - more conservative usage of html2text (Matt Ghali) - highlight empty inline C++ comments correctly, better pygmentize call (no - argument, use -g) (Antony Lee) - add support for Debian 2.0 files with xz packed data (Tobias Hoffmann) Version 1.82 Feb 04 2013 - better handling of encodings and protect against iconv failures Version 1.81 Jan 15 2013 - adjust Makefile generation, find uninstalled tarcolor in configure - add a spec file to generate a lesspipe RPM - correct LESSCOLORIZER call Version 1.80 Jan 13 2013 - test.pl now shows ignored tests and missing executables, tests added/deleted - check for existence of mp3info2 to display mp3 tags - check for existence of 7zr to display 7za archives - correct bug in 1.72 for less where dir contains spaces (Tobias Hoffmann) - add colorized tar listings using tarcolor (contributed by Marc Abramowitz) - suppress the ==> lines if LESSQUIET is set (proposed by Dale Wijnand) - use alternate syntax highlighting program given by LESSCOLORIZER, currently only pygmentizer and code2color are allowed (proposed by Christian Höltje) - add directory from LESSOPEN to $PATH, look in $PATH for code2color - Introduce DESTDIR support in Makefile (requested by Michel Hermier) - the generated lesspipe.sh in the tar file has syntax highlighting enabled and no LESS_ADVANCED_PREPROCESSOR support Version 1.72 Nov 17 2011 - detect proper options for the file command at runtime (Vincent Lefèvre) - guess the character encoding and optionally do a char conversion (VL) - make colored ls output working for different OS flavours (Marc Abramowitz) - do not interpret files with an extension .xml as html files (James Ahlborn) - eval `.../lesspipe.sh` will set LESS_ADVANCED_PREPROCESSOR if meaningful - sample less wrapper to open URLs with less (in contrib) (Sebastian Kayser) Version 1.71 Apr 06 2010 - detect a good version of tar, try to avoid /usr/bin/tar on Solaris (Jim Pryor) - do more preprocessing if LESS_ADVANCED_PREPROCESSOR is set - always try to interpret (g)roff formatted text (man pages) - better detection of lzip and xz compressed files (Vincent Lefèvre) - do not call identify for 'image text' tagged files (Vincent Lefèvre) - do not rely on contents of LANG variable for calling iconv (Vincent Lefèvre) - have a fallback to bash or zsh for the shell used at runtime (Vincent Lefèvre) Version 1.70 Jul 16 2009 - fixing the call of mktemp on MacOS (reported by Peter Kostka and Martin Otte) - detect helper programs at runtime (suggested by David Leverton, Petr Uzel) - add support for xz compression (Mathieu Bouillaguet) - more stringent tests for gzip compression - changes in rpm processing to better support MacOSX and BSD based systems - introduce --fixed in configure to statically control lesspipe generation - improved generation of Makefile - calling eval `.../lesspipe.sh` will set the ENV variable LESSOPEN properly - fixing jar processing if not using fastjar (was a bug in 1.60 only) - control amount of preprocessing by the ENV var LESS_ADVANCED_PREPROCESSOR if the related configure question is answered with y (default n) (Petr Uzel) - updated documentation to reflect recent changes Version 1.60 Dec 01, 2008 - major restructuring of code, support for even more file types (Jim Pryor) - using a temp dir and mktemp for creating temporary files - concentrate file type recognition in a function - rewritten the recognition and processing of html files, added xhtml recognition, add elinks and w3m as html parsers - better support for jar files (recognized by extension jar and xpi) - support for excel and powerpoint files (recognized by extension) - support for perl pod files - colored directory listings - list and view the control parts of *.deb packages - added support for lzip compression (Antonio Diaz Diaz) - added support for DjVu files (Florian Cramer) - improved zip support for Solaris, bug fixes in configure (Paul Townsend) - code cleanup and bug fixes in lesspipe based on the restructured code - enhanced test suite - update of the documentation (merged english.txt and README) Version 1.55 Aug 13, 2008 - cleanup documentation and code - remove support for unmounted media (floppy disks) - better UTF-8 support, add conversions between UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1 - add preliminary support for lzma compressed files (suggested by Goetz Waschk) - better support for 7-zip files (suggestion by Stephan Hegel) - fix misspelled program name 'links' Version 1.54 Jul 25, 2008 - improved support for mp3 files using id3v2 (hint from Markus Meyer) - added tests for mp3 files with id3 v1 and v2 tags - correctly recognize version of file command - prefer links over lynx for html display - add support for binary plist files (Mac OS X) (Peter D. Barnes Jr.) - add support for gpg encrypted files (Daniel Risacher) Version 1.53 Apr 11, 2006 - support for Openoffice documents (Florian Cramer, Vincent Lefevre) - support for RAR archives (suggested by Cindy Leonhardt) - support for 7-zip archives, UTF-16 text (proposed by Vincent Lefevre) - support for image formats (png, gif, jpeg and others) - small shell syntax fix (reported by Andrew Barnert) - better test to recognize tar and dvi files - do not include the full path for commands if they are in the search PATH - avoid "file -" command, relax requirements for "file", Solaris now ok (Ken) - display debian files without dpkg (hint by Juergen Kahnert) - mention in BUGS that syntax highlighting is an experimental feature - require at least version 1.0 of bzip2 - updated documentation Version 1.52 Jul 19, 2005 - variable replacement pattern containing % causes hang in AIX, escape % char - the output of the file command can contain file names, make it harder to mislead the file type recognition logic Version 1.51 May 26, 2005 - fix typo in Makefile (PREFIX instead of prefix in configure) - change consistently test syntax to be compliant to more shells - display command to set LESSOPEN env variable when called without args - fix a few cases where filenames containing space were not treated properly - add a manpage for lesspipe.sh Version 1.50 Apr 12, 2005 - major changes in the processing of file names, thus allowing the display of files with white space in the name even if they are contained in archives - display of "perl storable" (see perldoc Storable) files by Slaven Rezic - many changes to get rid of minor bugs related to syntax highlighting and the display of files contained in archives - lesspipe.sh successfully tested to also work with pdksh (tested with v. 5.2) - added test suite, commands listed in TESTCMDS, test files are in testok and testnok. Can be started with make test - improved configure script and documentation enhancements Version 1.44 Dec 14, 2004 ------------------------- - fixes in configure script (Slaven Rezic) - fixes for ksh syntax by Jens Schleusener Version 1.43 Dec 09, 2004 ------------------------- - fixes for Cygwin by Slaven Rezic and for FreeBSD by Ben Kibbey - better recognition of perl files in code2color (Slaven Rezic) - treat Active State's PPD files as XML files (proposed by Soeren Adersen - syntax highlighting has to be enabled explicitly when calling configure - fixed bug in trap statement when using /bin/sh as shell Version 1.42 Apr 15, 2004 ------------------------- - add support for Microsoft cabinet files through cabextract (v1.0 required) - correct bug (less -F was not working if used with lesspipe) Version 1.41 Apr 01, 2004 ------------------------- - speed up lesspipe considerably for viewing large files (hint by Istvan Marko) - rework the syntax highlighting code (should now be compliant to more OS flavors, patches by Remi Mommsen and by WF) - support for MacOS X archives and bom files (request by Remi Mommsen) Version 1.40 Mar 21, 2004 ------------------------- - introduce syntax highlighting (through 'syntax', a perl helper script) - ATTENTION: it will work only with less -r or less -R - deactivated perl support again, perldoc -m otherwise not working properly - display contents of iso images Version 1.37 Aug 08, 2003 ------------------------- - perl support was not working under all circumstances Version 1.36 Aug 08, 2003 ------------------------- - add new option --default in configure script - add support for perl files containing pod documentation Version 1.35 Jan 06, 2003 ------------------------- - prefer pstotext over ps2ascii if available - prefer html2text over lynx if available - show the contents of mp3 files (with mp3 tags) using mp3info - for unknown (binary) data display the contained ASCII strings - support for ASCII-art (2nd version, very experimental, commented out) most of the changes proposed by Florian Cramer - corrected minor bugs in the configure script Version 1.34 May 16, 2002 ------------------------- - forgotten #endif in configure - use /usr/bin/env perl to process the configure script Version 1.33 Mar 12, 2002 ------------------------- - enhanced output for .deb files (proposed by Carl Greco) - default script language is bash on linux systems, ksh on all other platforms - search GNU file also under the name gfile Version 1.32 Jan 17, 2002 ------------------------- - add support for Postscript and DVI format - enhance the processing of *roff files (.me and .ms files, respect LANG=jp) - added support for the files compressed with pack - minor change in RPM output (changes inspired by lessopen.sh in SuSE Linux 7.3) - change in configure script to check more precisely for shell versions Version 1.31 Dec 12, 2001 ------------------------- - add option --yes to configure to allow for unattended installation - more generic Makefile (both by Philippe Defert) - corrected a bug that prevented HTML filtering for (t)csh users Version 1.30 Nov 21, 2001 ------------------------- - add support for Rich Text Format (RTF). - modify the highly experimental support for ASCII-art (still commented out) both modifications proposed by Florian Cramer. - the configure script now checks for a working shell - added more extended english documentation (english.txt) Version 1.23 Oct 30, 2001 ------------------------ - call ps -up to have a trailing blank after less in the ps output (case HTML) - generate a simple Makefile, rudimentary options for configure Version 1.22 Aug 10, 2001 ------------------------ - w3m uses internally less, refuse to convert html unless called from less Version 1.21 Aug 8, 2001 ------------------------ - recognize file type "... text executable" as text, not as binary Version 1.20 Aug 6, 2001 ------------------------ - Add support for removable media via the /dev/xxx files (e.g. tar files on tapes, floppies) example: less /dev/fd0 - Add support for unmounted DOS Filesystems using the mtools command suite via the /dev/xxx files. Example: less /dev/fd0 - determine version of 'file' program and configure lesspipe.sh accordingly - some cleanup of configure script Version 1.10 Feb 19, 2001 ------------------------- - use Lynx instead of w3m as proposed by Heinrich Kuettler - Add support for PDF-Files via 'pdftotext' by Derek B. Noonburg - Change format of first line in output (replace '='s by '==>'). - use configure to customize lesspipe.sh for local computer - add support for ASCII-art by Florian Cramer (very experimental, commented out) Version 1.05 Jan 24, 2001 ------------------------- - Add support for Debian packages by Michael Wiedmann - Add MS Word support via 'antiword' by Florian Cramer Version 1.04 Jun 18, 2000 ------------------------- - Variable separator character, better colon handling. Version 1.03 May 2, 2000 ------------------------- - Bug in handling filenames with spaces corrected. Version 1.02 Apr 12, 2000 ------------------------- - Bugs in RPM handling corrected (relocatable RPM's). Version 1.01 Mar 14, 2000 ------------------------- - First attempt to handle filenames with spaces. Version 1.0 Feb 16, 2000 ------------------------ - Complete rewrite to allow recursive unpacking. Version 0.4 Jan 16, 2000 ------------------------ - Add RPM support, better documentation. Version 0.3 Aug 6, 1999 ------------------------ - Add bzip2 support. Version 0.2 Nov 20, 1998 ------------------------ - Be more verbose for special files. Version 0.1 May 25, 1997 ------------------------ - First public release.