Find text inside compressed files

Designed by Freepik

You have a group of files and some of them are compressed with zip or gz and you want to search for a specific text in each of them. To do this, you can use the following command:

find -name [FILE_PATTERN] -print0 | xargs -0 zgrep "[TEXT_TO_FIND]"

Where:
[FILE_PATTERN] : is the pattern of the files.
[TEXT_TO_FIND] : is the text to find inside the files.

Let's say we have the following files:

peter-01.gz
peter-02
peter-03.gz
peterA
peterB.gz
maria-01
maria-02.gz

And you want to find the text "my friend" only in the files that begininng with "peter-". To do this, you can use the following:

find -name peter-\* -print0 | xargs -0 zgrep "my friend"

Note the use of  \* as a wildcard.