any way to bat (cat or more) the zipped text file like 'less'?

[yaanlpc]

Hope there would be no additional arguments to 'less' zipped text file

[eth-p]

If I understand correctly, you want to know if it's possible to print the text contents of something like file.txt.gz? That would be like how lesspipe preprocesses files/directories that are given to less.

The way less does it is by sending the file name to a command specified by the LESSOPEN environment variable. A couple years back, we had experimental support for that (#1597) which didn't make it into the main branch. More recently, #2444 added proper support for it. It's not provided in default builds yet, however.

In the meantime, it's still possible to use bat as LESSOPEN: