Antonio Diaz Diaz <anto...@gnu.org> writes: > Dale R. Worley wrote: >> What doesn't seem to exist is something that does step 2 in a general >> way. The tool that is needed is something that reads the first few >> bytes of a file, determines which compression signature is present if >> any, then processes the contents through the correct decompressor. > > Such tool[1] does in fact exist since 2009. It is only that it is not yet > widely known. :-) > > [1] http://www.nongnu.org/zutils/manual/zutils_manual.html#Zgrep
Looking at that page, I think you meant to point to #Zcat. But yes, it does seem to do that job. Mary via Bug reports for GNU grep <bug-grep@gnu.org> writes: > GNU tar also supports `-I, --use-compress-program=PROG filter > through PROG (must accept -d)`, which is one of the reasons I thought > it would be relevant to add a similar option to grep. So the construction I'm thinking of would be grep ... --use-compress-program=zcat ... pattern file ... except it looks like zcat doesn't accept -d (which would need to be a no-op for it). Though it looks like zcat supports five compression techniques and gnu tar handles eight, so zcat should be expanded there. Dale