Grepping through .gz log files

Question

Does there exist a magical shell piping which would allow easily to grep through bunch of .gz log files without needing to extract them somewhere?

.gz files are Apache logs, result of log rotation. I'd like to quickly check how often certain URIs are accessed in the past.

Answer 1

The zgrep program is available for Linux (and perhaps some Unix too). This will decompress the files and then grep through them.

Answer 2

You can just use zgrep to grep through compressed files.

If you need to use a specific grep, you can set the GREP environment variable:

export GREP=/bin/egrep

Answer 3

Should you for some reason lack zgrep you can do the same thing with gunzip and a pipe:

gunzip -c <filename.gz> | grep <whatever you want to grep for>

Answer 4

How about zgrep? Seems to be installed on Mac OS and Ubuntu 11.04.

Answer 5

I usually use: zcat filename.gz | less