Find, grep gzipped file

Question

I want to do grep some lines from files I'm finding with the find command. The files are zipped though. How can I find them, de-compress them, do my grep search and put my results into a new file.

zcat find /my_home -name '*log.20140226*' | grep 'vid=123'

is not working, give the error:

 gzip: invalid option -- 'e'
 Try `gzip --help' for more information.

I assume though that if it were working, to save I should add

> ~/found_logs.20140226.txt 

Is this correct?

What is wrong with my zcat and grep string?

Answer 1

Use this (untested):

find /my_home -name '*log.20140226*' -exec zgrep -H 'vid=123' {} \; > results

Or, if you want to find files with lines containing your 2 different strings, in any order:

find /my_home -name '*log.20140226*' -exec zegrep -H "vid=23.*mid=2|mid=2.*vid=23" {} \; > results

Notes:

The -H option causes grep to print the name of the matching file.

I use * z *grep to handle compressed files, and then * ze *grep to handle the regular expression of "pattern|pattern" wherein I specify the search strings in both possible orders on the line, so I am effectively searching for EITHER of two patterns, namely "vid followed by mid" OR "mid followed by vid". I hope that is clear!

Thanks and kudos to other contributors involved discussion below.

Answer 2

You can use zgrep

cd /my_home
zgrep 'vid=123' *log.20140226*

Answer 3

You need to use:

zcat `find /my_home -name '*log.20140226*'`|grep 'vid=123'

Without the backticks find /my_home ... is being sent as arguments to zcat , when you want the output of the find to be sent as arguments to zcat .