grep – Searching for a string in files recursively

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.

You can use perl compatible regular expressions grep:

$ pcregrep -M '(searchString.*\n)(?!.*excludeString)' file
foo2 searchString bar
foo3 searchString bar
foo4 searchString bar

It searches searchString followed by any char ., repeated zero or more times *, followed by new line \n only if there is not (?!) pattern .*excludeString next to it. Option -M is present in order to match multi lines.