There I said it !
Yeah, it's a pain. Leads to bad one liners:
for i in $(ls); do zcat $i || cat $i; doneThanks !
But still we shouldn't have to resort to this !
Also, can't get the output through pipefor i in $(ls); do zcat $i || cat $i; done | grep mysearchtermthis appears to workfind . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -I{} sh -c 'zcat "{}" 2>/dev/null || cat "{}"' | grep "mysearchterm"Still, that was a speed bump that I guess everyone dealing with mass compressed log files has to figure out on the fly because zcat can't read uncompressed files ! argg !!!for i in $(ls); do zcat $i 2>/dev/null || cat $i; done | grep mysearchtermBtw, don't parse ls. Use
find |while read -rinstead.find -maxdepth 1 -name "term" -print |while read -r file do zcat "$file" 2>/dev/null || cat "$file" doneWon't this cause cat to iterate through all files in the cwd once zcat encounters an issue, instead of just the specific file?
Yeah, i was tired and had $file there first, then saw that you wanted to cat all in directory. Still tired, but i think this works now.
You can just do
for f in *(or other shell glob), unless you needfind's fancy search/filtering features.The shell glob isn't just simpler, but also more robust, because it works also when the filename contains a newline;
find .. | while read -rwill crap out on that. Also apparently you wantwhile IFS= read -rbecause otherwise read might trim whitespace.If you want to avoid that problem with the newline and still use find, you can use
find -execorfind -print0 .. | xargs -0, orfind -print0 .. | while IFS= read -r -d ''. I think-print0is not standard POSIX though.because it works also when the filename contains a newline
Doesn't that depend on the shell?
How do you propose zcat tell the difference between an uncompressed file and a corrupted compressed file? Or are you saying if it doesn't recognize it as compressed, just dump the source file regardless? Because that could be annoying.
Even a corrupt compressed files has a very different structure relative to plain text. "file" already has the code to detect exactly which.
Still, failing on corrupted compression instead of failing on plaintext would be an improvement.
What even is plain text anymore? If you mean ASCII, ok, but that leaves out a lot. Should it include a minimal utf-8 detector? Utf-16? The latest goofy encoding? Should zcat duplicate the functionality of file? Generally, unix-like commands do one thing, and do it well, combining multiple functions is frowned upon.
I wouldn't call all this hoop jumping to reading common log files "doing it better".
This is exactly the kind of arcane tinkering that makes everything a tedious time wasting chore on linux.
At this point it's accepted that text files get zipped and that should be handled transparently and not be precious about kilobits of logic storage as if we were still stuck on a 80386 with 4 megs of ram.
-f --force If the input data is not in a format recognized by gzip, and if the option --stdout is also given, copy the input data without change to the standard output: let zcat behave as cat.I don't know why this isn't the top comment. I guess there might be some scenario where you'd want to know about non-gzip files where you don't expect them so changing the defaults would probably cause some subtle breakage. For shell use though, just an alias could be used;
alias zcat=gzip -cdfin that case, i'd prefer a
~/bin/zcatwith the contents#!/bin/sh exec gzip -cdf "$@"this way, it's exec'able, unlike an alias or shell function.
