This version of less includes lesspipe.sh from Wolfgang Friebel ( http://www-zeuthen.desy.de/~friebel//unix/less/ ). This enables you to view gz, bz2, lzma, zip, rpm and html files among others with less. It works by setting the LESSOPEN environment variable, see the man pages for details. If you want to disable this behavior, either use 'unset LESSOPEN' or use an alias ( alias less='less -l' ). less will open html files with lynx, then html2text, then cat if none of the previous were found.