lesspipe.sh is an input filter for the pager less as described in its man page. The script runs under a ksh compliant shell (ksh, bash, zsh) and allows to view files with binary content, compressed files, archives and files contained in archives. A large and growing number of formats are supported both as plain and compressed files using compress, gzip, bzip2, lzma, lzip or zip.
Details can be found in the README file.

Experimental support for syntax highlighting was added through a perl script code2color which is derived from Peter Palfraders code2html script. The script code2color is written in perl and has colorizing support for the languages ada, asm, awk, c, c++, groff, html, xml, java, javascript, lisp, m4, make, pascal, patch, perl, povray, python, ruby, shellscript and sql.

Syntax highlighting is only activated if the environment variable LESS is existing and contains the option -R or -r or less is called with one of these options. This guarantees, that instead of literal escape sequences colors are displayed. The detection of the -r/-R presence at runtime is rather dependent on the operating system and may not work in all cases.