Nicola wrote:
I have to apologize. It turns out that I was working with a symlink to a file in a shared directory, and another user had bunzipped those files, keeping the same name (to start with, the compressed files didn't have a .bz2 suffix - don't ask me why). The copy in my laptop was made before that happened, so there all was fine. Cherry on the cake: recently I was viewing the files with bzless instead of bzcat - which, I've now realized, behaves like less if the file is plain text.
Well, that's embarassing (and somewhat irritating, as I've spent a bunch of hours trying to figure out what was going on).
Thanks for trying to help. I'll do my best to avoid posting noise again.
Nicola
Thanks for the notice. Don't be embarrassed. This kind of stuff happens to everybody every once in a while :-)