find string inside a gzipped file in a folder

Question

My current problem is that I have around 10 folders, which contain gzipped files (around on an average 5 each). This makes it 50 files to open and look at.

Is there a simpler method to find out if a gzipped file inside a folder has a particular pattern or not?

zcat ABC/myzippedfile1.txt.gz | grep "pattern match" zcat ABC/myzippedfile2.txt.gz | grep "pattern match" 

Instead of writing a script, can I do the same in a single line, for all the folders and sub folders?

for f in `ls *.gz`; do echo $f; zcat $f | grep <pattern>; done; 

Answer 1

zgrep will look in gzipped files, has a -R recursive option, and a -H show me the filename option:

zgrep -R --include=*.gz -H "pattern match" . 

OS specific commands as not all arguments work across the board:

Mac 10.5+: zgrep -R --include=\*.gz -H "pattern match" .

Ubuntu 16+: zgrep -i -H "pattern match" *.gz

Answer 2

You don't need zcat here because there is zgrep and zegrep.

If you want to run a command over a directory hierarchy, you use find:

find . -name "*.gz" -exec zgrep ⟨pattern⟩ \{\} \; 

And also “ls *.gz” is useless in for and you should just use “*.gz” in the future.