Grep – Searching for a String in Multiple Zip Files

grepsearchsolariszip

I am working on SunOS 5.10. I have a folder that contains about 200 zip files. Each zip file contains only one text file in it.
I would like to search for a specific string in all the text files in all the zip files.

I tried this (which searches for any text file in the zip file that contains the string "ORA-") but it didn't work.

zipgrep ORA-1680 *.zip

What is the correct of doing it without uncompressing the zip files?

Best Answer

It is in general not possible to search for content within a compressed file without uncompressing it one way or another. Since zipgrep is only a shellscript, wrapping unzip and egrep itself, you might just as well do it manually:

for file in *.zip; do unzip -c "$file" | grep "ORA-1680"; done

If you need just the list of matching zip files, you can use something like:

for file in *.zip; do
    if ( unzip -c "$file" | grep -q "ORA-1680"); then
        echo "$file"
    fi
done

This way you are only decompressing to stdout (ie. to memory) instead of decompressing the files to disk. You can of course try to just grep -a the zip files but depending on the content of the file and your pattern, you might get false positives and/or false negatives.

Related Solutions

Zip – How to Zip a File Without Including the Parent Directory

If you want to store all the files in folder under their name without a directory indication, you can use the -j option.

zip -j folder/artifact.zip folder/artifact1.app folder/artifact2.ext2 folder/artifact3.ext3

zip -j folder/{artifact.zip,artifact1.app,artifact2.ext2,artifact3.ext3}

If you have files in subdirectories, they won't have any directory component in the archive either, e.g. folder/subdir/foo will be stored in the archive as foo.

But it would probably be easier to change to the directory. It's almost exactly the same amount of typing as the brace method aboe. If you do that, if you include files in subdirectories, they'll have their relative path from the directory you changed into, e.g. folder/subdir/foo will be stored as subdir/foo.

(cd folder && zip artifact.zip artifact1.app artifact2.ext2 artifact3.ext3)

For interactive use, you lose shell completion this way, because the shell doesn't realize that you'll be in a different directory when you run the zip command. To remedy that, issue the cd command separately. To easily go back to the previous directory, you can use pushd and popd.

pushd folder
zip artifact.zip artifact1.app artifact2.ext2 artifact3.ext3
popd

If you want full control over the paths stored in a zip file, you can create a forest of symbolic links. Unless instructed otherwise, zip doesn't store symbolic links.

Searching for a string that contains the file name

With GNU awk:

gawk '
  BEGINFILE{search = "@code prefix." substr(FILENAME, 3, length(FILENAME) - 6)}
  index($0, search)' ./*.py.txt

Would report the matching lines.

To print the file name and matching line, change index($0, search) to

  index($0, search) {print FILENAME": "$0}

Or to print the file name only:

  index($0, search) {print FILENAME; nextfile}

Replace FILENAME with substr(FILENAME, 3) to skip outputting the ./ prefix.

The list of files is lexically sorted. The ones whose name starts with . are ignored (some shells have a dotglob option to add them back; with zsh, you can also use the (D) glob qualifier).

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Zip – How to Zip a File Without Including the Parent Directory

Searching for a string that contains the file name

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