How to do a find on the gzipped files

[Hunki]

There are number of gzipped log files which I need to search for a text , how shall I search these files without gunzipping them.

thanks,
hunki

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Hunki:

This should work.

# find /path -xdev -type f -name "*.gz" | xargs -n1 -t gzip -d -c | grep pattern

For example, given '/tmp/hosts.gz' and '/tmp/services.gz' --- copies of the standard files, gzipped:

# find /tmp -xdev -type f -name "*.gz" | xargs -n1 -t gzip -d -c |grep local

...produces:

gzip -d -c /tmp/hosts.gz
127.0.0.1 localhost loopback
gzip -d -c /tmp/services.gz
hacl-local 5304/tcp # HA Cluster Commands

...by using the trace option of 'xargs' and processing one argument at a time ('-n 1') we can show the filename in which the match occurs. Your files are only uncompressed on-the-fly. They are left unchanged on disk.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Rasheed Tamton]

You can also use gzcat

find . -name '*gz' -exec /usr/contrib/bin/gzcat {} \;|grep thestring

gzcat filename.gz|grep thestring

If /usr/contrib/bin is in your path you can just use gzcat. Also you can use it with the xargs option mentioned above by James.

Regards,
Rasheed Tamton.

[Rasheed Tamton]

This might be more suitable if you have more zipped files to search

for i in `find /tmp -name "*gz"`
do
echo $i
/usr/contrib/bin/gzcat $i|grep string
done

Change /tmp (dir name) according to your find requirement.

Regards,
Rasheed Tamton.