viewing contents of tar/tar.gz/tgz files

[volvoguy]

I just checked to make sure I'm not going crazy. It's the same version
of "less" on my Ubuntu machine and my Slackware machine. When I do
"less file.tar.gz" in Ubuntu, I get the message about it being a
binary file. When I do the exact same command in Slackware (and really
- every other distro I've ever tried), I get the following (which
happens to be the tar.gz download of Adobe's SVG plugin):

drwxr-xr-x root/root         0 2003-12-18 13:49:24 adobesvg-3.01/
-r--r--r-- root/root   4263296 2003-12-18 13:49:24 adobesvg-3.01/libAGM.so
-r--r--r-- root/root    642672 2003-12-18 13:49:24 adobesvg-3.01/libACE.so
-r--r--r-- root/root   2064616 2003-12-18 13:49:24
adobesvg-3.01/libCoolType.so-r--r--r-- root/root    493532 2003-12-18
13:49:24 adobesvg-3.01/libBIB.so
-r--r--r-- root/root   3694884 2003-12-18 13:49:24 adobesvg-3.01/libSVGCore.so
-r--r--r-- root/root    426832 2003-12-18 13:49:24 adobesvg-3.01/libNPSVG3.so
-r--r--r-- root/root     21485 2003-12-18 13:49:24 adobesvg-3.01/LICENSE.txt
-r--r--r-- root/root     10455 2003-12-18 13:49:24 adobesvg-3.01/ReadMe.html
-r--r--r-- root/root      3102 2003-12-18 13:49:24 adobesvg-3.01/SVGHelp.html
-r--r--r-- root/root     94561 2003-12-18 13:49:24 adobesvg-3.01/SVGAbout.svg
-r-xr-xr-x root/root      2546 2003-12-18 13:49:24 adobesvg-3.01/install.sh
adobesvg-3.01x88-linux-i386.tar.gz lines 1-12/12 (END)


Weird, huh? I tried Oli's suggestion of zless, and I didn't get the
warning message, but it just displayed a bunch of binary info junk on
the screen (it did in Slackware as well). I also checked and it
doesn't appear that less is an alias to zless in Slackware. The
versions of less are identical on both machines ("less 381"). I've
been using this method for years and I just figured that I was doing
something wrong in Ubuntu - but I've transferred the exact same file
back and forth between the two machines and it does what I expect in
Slackware and not in Ubuntu.

Any other suggestions?

Aaron