Thanks for the bug report. This bug occurs because 'less' ignores the
exit status of gzip. That is, 'less' uses the LESSOPEN environment
variable to discover that gzip is the input processor, and uses gzip,
but when it calls pclose on the resulting stream it discards the exit
status returned by pclose. 'less' should inspect the exit status and
report an error in that case.
I'll CC: this email to bug-l...@gnu.org to give its developer a
heads-up. Mark, the original bug report is here:
http://bugs.gnu.org/16951