Re: [vox-tech] reading gzip'd files inline

[Peter Jay Salzman <p@diMAPSrac.org>]

On Mon 19 Feb 01, 11:55 AM, Dale Bewley said: 
> Well, as far as I know the only "stream editor" is sed or a perl script of
> course. 
 
> Any interactive editor is going to have to buffer the whole file.

well, lots of commands can take input from stdin.  isn't that one of the
benefits of unix?  transparency in where data is coming from, since everything
is a /stream/.   whether you read in from a file or read in from stdin, it
shouldn't make a difference.  it reads streams and writes streams.

lots of stuff has nice behavior:

        echo "hello dolly" | mail p@dirac.org -s 'guys and dolls'

i was hoping to do something similar with vim (see below).

> At that point you may as well have unzipped the file to disk before
> editing it. 

not quite.  for example, i'd like to make a cd with all the howto's on
them.  of course, i'd like for them to be gziped because of the limited
amount of space.

vim provides some really nice functionality, even if i don't intend on
actually editing the file.   text markers, buffers, syntax highlighting,
etc.   all would be nice.  so i'd rather use vim than a viewer.

pete