Thanks !

But still we shouldn't have to resort to this !

Also, can't get the output through pipe

for i in $(ls); do zcat $i || cat $i; done | grep mysearchterm

this appears to work

find . -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 mysearchterm