xzless report an error

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The cause is the verbose output of less -V.
So, I fixed with

diff /usr/bin/xzless /tmp/xzless
49c49
< if test "$(less -V | { read ver && echo ${ver#less }; })" -ge 429; then
---
> if test "$(less -V | awk '{if (NR ==1) print $2}')" -ge 429; then

Thanks for taking your time to report this issue and help making Ubuntu better.

I can confirm the error message still shows up on the latest version of xzless on Ubuntu Trusty.

I found that the same issue has been reported to Debian, along with a patch which was forwarded upstream. It looks like the issue has been fixed in xz, but the newer version has just not been packaged yet.

Triaged: Obvious cause found
High: Makes the program fail completely

Upstream fix, for reference: http://git.tukaani.org/?p=xz.git;a=commitdiff;h=db5c181

This bug was fixed in the package xz-utils - 5.1.1alpha+20120614-2ubuntu2

---------------
xz-utils (5.1.1alpha+20120614-2ubuntu2) trusty; urgency=low

  * debian/patches/error-parsing-less.patch. LP: #1248044
    - parse correctly recent versions of less output
 -- <email address hidden> (Javier P.L.) Sun, 09 Feb 2014 01:21:14 -0600