Grep through compressed (gzipped) log files

The logrotate linux utility automatically compresses your ever-growing production log files.

If you encountered an error and wanted to search the history including all compressed logs, you may have considered unzipping all of them into a directory and run a grep in that directory.

Fortunately linux offers a more idiomatic way for grepping gzipped files: zgrep.

From the manual:

zgrep, zegrep, and zfgrep act like grep, egrep, and fgrep, respectively, but accept input files compressed with the compress(1) or gzip(1) compression utilities.

h/t Jack Christensen

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