No Need to Unzip, Just Use Zcat or Zgrep

There will be times when you may encountered a zipped file and want to quickly parse it without having to unzip it. When the time comes, zcat and zgrep will be your savior. The usages of both are very straightforward but there are man pages for both for further reading. Basic usages of the two are depicted below.

Display the contents of a zipped file

zcat data.gz

Search for specific characters/words in zipped files.

zgrep “some_word” data.gz