Linux search text string from .bz2 files recursively in subdirectories

Question

I have a case where multiple .bz2 files are situated in subdirectories. And I want to search for a text, from all files, using bzcat and grep command linux commands.

I am able to search one-one file by using the following command:

bzcat <filename.bz2> | grep -ia 'text string' | less

But I now I need to do the above for all files in subdirectories.

Answer 1

You can use bzgrep instead of bzcat and grep. This is faster.

To grep recursively in a directory tree use find:

find -type f -name '*.bz2' -execdir bzgrep "pattern" {} \;

find is searching recursively for all files with the *.bz2 extension and applies the command specified with -execdir to them.

Answer 2

There are several methods:

bzgrep regexp $(find -name \*.bz2)

This method will work if number of the found files is not very big (and they have no special characters in the pathes). Otherwise you better use this one:

find -name \*.bz2 -exec bzgrep regexp {} /dev/null \;

Please note /dev/null in the second method. You use it to make bzgrep print the filename, where the regexp was found.