A thousand pardons. You are right. I phrased the question wrongly. Chimera does open gzip'd files ( xx.gz). It does not open compress'd files (xx.Z).
You can also open gzipped files with Chimera's "open" command or as an argument as you start Chimera. [...]
You can use the Chimera File / Open... dialog to directly open a gzip PDB file. This was added to Chimera about one year ago. It does not work
Why, you may ask, would anyone use compress these days ? If you mirror or rsync the protein data bank, they are still distributing files that have been squashed with compress and have a ".Z" extension. gunzip will happily eat and uncompress these files. I do not know how chimera handles compressed files. If it reads from a pipe, it might be nice to persuade it to feed .Z files to gunzip. I think it might be more difficult if chimera uses the python/zlib interface. Many thanks -- Search for products and services at: http://search.mail.com