I am on Debian 7.6. I installed zlibc from the Debian repository, and compliled from zlibc-0.9k . I have yet to get it to work. Both fail to uncompress with simple commands like cat(1) and head(1) . For example: zcat /etc/alternatives/xjc.1.gz | head .'" t ." ." Copyright 2005-2006 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All Rights Reserved. ." DO NOT ALTER OR REMOVE COPYRIGHT NOTICES OR THIS FILE HEADER. ." ." This code is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it ." under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 only, as ." published by the Free Software Foundation. ." ." This code is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ls -l /lib/uncompress.so -rwSr-Sr-- 1 root root 40464 Oct 9 2009 /lib/uncompress.so export LD_PRELOAD=uncompress.so env | grep LD_ LD_PRELOAD=uncompress.so LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/lib:/usr/lib head /etc/alternatives/xjc.1.gz | od -c 0000000 037 213 \b \0 \0 \0 \0 \0 002 003 275 Z k s 333 F 0000020 262 375 316 _ 1 245 335 l 354 224 004 J 362 & [ W 0000040 Q 251 226 226 h K ) 275 . I 305 v 205 256 354 020 : etc. LD_ZLIB_VERBOSE=1 head /etc/alternatives/xjc.1.gz >/dev/null progname = head /home/mbianchi/.zlibrc /etc/zlibc.conf opening /home/mbianchi/.zlibrc 0 Listing class 4 4 4 .tar0 1 default ls -l /home/mbianchi/.zlibrc ls: cannot access /home/mbianchi/.zlibrc: No such file or directory head /etc/zlibc.conf # sample zlibrc file # by default, commands may also unlink compressed files commands default use unlink commands "xman" use disable # Eamcs has its own way of handling compressed files commands "xemacs" use disable disable_child Any ideas as to what might be wrong? -- Mike Bianchi Foveal Systems 973 822-2085 MBianchi@Foveal.com http://www.AutoAuditorium.com http://www.FovealMounts.com