[SATLUG] Utilities

[Al Castanoli]

$ man zcat

On Tue, 2007-11-13 at 08:34 -0600, Geoff wrote:
> There are so many programs out there written for linux, for generic 
> linux jobs, it's easy to get bogged down in the myriad of possibilities.
> 
> I'm looking for one utility, in particular (that probably already 
> exists) that will look at the contents of such files as say...
> /var/log/messages-20061001.gz
> 
> I know they're archived, but I'm looking for a specific string, without 
> having to expand the silly thing to a temp dir, which would consume 
> space on a drive,
> use 'less 'filename' | grep -i pattern', get pissed because what I'm 
> looking for isn't there, delete that expanded archive, then go through 
> the whole procedure again, for files that start at the beginning of LAST 
> year.
> 
> There's GOT to be an easier way!
> 
> Help?
> 
> Command line help, that is.  no gui packages, please.
> 
> 
>