There I said it !

  • Malfeasant@lemm.ee
    3·
    1 hour ago

    How do you propose zcat tell the difference between an uncompressed file and a corrupted compressed file? Or are you saying if it doesn’t recognize it as compressed, just dump the source file regardless? Because that could be annoying.

    • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.mlOP
      1·
      13 minutes ago

      Even a corrupt compressed files has a very different structure relative to plain text. “file” already has the code to detect exactly which.

      Still, failing on corrupted compression instead of failing on plaintext would be an improvement.

  • elmicha@feddit.org
    21·
    13 hours ago

    I agree. zgrep also works for uncompressed files, so we could use e.g. zgrep ^ instead of zcat.

  • allywilson@lemmy.ml
    14·
    13 hours ago

    Yeah, it’s a pain. Leads to bad one liners:

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

      • allywilson@lemmy.ml
        3·
        2 hours ago

        Won’t this cause cat to iterate through all files in the cwd once zcat encounters an issue, instead of just the specific file?

    • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.mlOP
      61·
      13 hours ago

      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