bug#16951: zless error under ulimit -v

[Paul Eggert]

Mark Nudelman wrote:
> Since less-451, if LESSOPEN starts with two pipe chars, less does
> examine the exit status of the preprocessor.

Thanks, I didn't know that, and I have installed the attached patch to 
the gzip master on savannah to take advantage of it.  Unfortunately the 
patch doesn't suffice, because 'less' examines the preprocessor's exit 
status only when the preprocessor generates no output.  In the case 
we're talking about, the preprocessor generates some output, but then 
runs out of memory and exits with nonzero status.

You can reproduce the 'less' problem by creating a large text file 't', 
compressing it with 'gzip t', running the following shell command in one 
window:

LESSOPEN='||-gzip -cdfq -- %s' less t.gz

When you see the first screenful, go to another window and kill the gzip 
process that's waiting for 'less' to read more input.  'less' won't 
notice or report the gzip failure.

0001-zless-improve-gzip-failure-checking-and-port-to-new-.patch
Description: Text document