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just use -f lol.
less $(which zcat) shows us a gzip wrapper. So we look through gzip options and see:
-f --force
Force compression or decompression. If the input data is not in a format recognized by gzip, and if the option --stdout is also given, copy the input data without change to the standard output: let zcat behave as cat.
party music
How do you propose zcat tell the difference between an uncompressed file and a corrupted compressed file? Or are you saying if it doesn't recognize it as compressed, just dump the source file regardless? Because that could be annoying.
Even a corrupt compressed files has a very different structure relative to plain text. "file" already has the code to detect exactly which.
Still, failing on corrupted compression instead of failing on plaintext would be an improvement.
What even is plain text anymore? If you mean ASCII, ok, but that leaves out a lot. Should it include a minimal utf-8 detector? Utf-16? The latest goofy encoding? Should zcat duplicate the functionality of file? Generally, unix-like commands do one thing, and do it well, combining multiple functions is frowned upon.
I wouldn't call all this hoop jumping to reading common log files "doing it better".
This is exactly the kind of arcane tinkering that makes everything a tedious time wasting chore on linux.
At this point it's accepted that text files get zipped and that should be handled transparently and not be precious about kilobits of logic storage as if we were still stuck on a 80386 with 4 megs of ram.
I agree. zgrep also works for uncompressed files, so we could use e.g. zgrep ^ instead of zcat.
Thanks, didn't know that existed
That's basically everything I was looking for !
I think that providing an exit status that is not 0 when zcat is used with an uncompressed file is useful. Though my opinion is less strong regarding whether it should write more text after an error occurred, it's probably more useful for a process to terminate quickly when an error occurred rather than risk a second error occurring and making troubleshooting harder.
I think that trying to change any existing documented features of widely used utilities will lead to us having less useful software in the future (our time is probably better spent making new programs and new documentation): https://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better
Not improving existing software leads to stagnation.
It's certainly a good part of why so much of linux is an awkward kludgy idiosyncratic mess to use.
Whatever the first implementation does ends up being a suicide pact by default.
Another option is to change cat to auto decompress compressed files, instead of printing gibberish.
What operating system should I use with my laptop that isn't an awkward kludgy idiosyncratic mess? I would say that Windows has plenty of kludges, like having problems with certain file names. Many versions of macOS are UNIX® Certified Products (for example, macOS version 15.0 Sequoia on Intel-based Mac computers and on Apple silicon-based Mac computers), so it's surely not any less kludgy than Linux.
I suppose that it's not bad to change documentation to be more specific, and change a program such that it matches the new documentation and wouldn't cause any harm if it replaced all the existing versions of the program, but makes it possible to use the program to solve more problems. That would be to "add functionality in a backward compatible manner".
You are also free to create new programs that are not an exact replacement for existing programs, but can enable some people to stop using one or more other programs. That would not be what I describe as stagnation.
"The cat utility shall read files in sequence and shall write their contents to the standard output in the same sequence.", so I would be very annoyed if it did something different with a certain file but not others. I wouldn't say that the contents of a file and the contents after the file is expanded are the same.
In fact, I expect that some people use cat to process compressed files, and changing how cat acts with compressed files would probably cause them a large amount of annoyance, and would needlessly make a lot of existing documentation incorrect.
Yeah, it's a pain. Leads to bad one liners:
for i in $(ls); do zcat $i || cat $i; done
Btw, don't parse ls. Use find |while read -r instead.
find -maxdepth 1 -name "term" -print |while read -r file
do zcat "$file" 2>/dev/null || cat "$file"
done
You can just do for f in * (or other shell glob), unless you need find's fancy search/filtering features.
The shell glob isn't just simpler, but also more robust, because it works also when the filename contains a newline; find .. | while read -r will crap out on that. Also apparently you want while IFS= read -r because otherwise read might trim whitespace.
If you want to avoid that problem with the newline and still use find, you can use find -exec or find -print0 .. | xargs -0, or find -print0 .. | while IFS= read -r -d ''. I think -print0 is not standard POSIX though.
because it works also when the filename contains a newline
Doesn't that depend on the shell?
I don't think so and have never heard that, but I could be wrong.
Won't this cause cat to iterate through all files in the cwd once zcat encounters an issue, instead of just the specific file?
You are correct. This probably produces something more similar to what you'd want the original command to do, but with better safely:
find -- . -type f -regex '^\./[^/]*$' -exec sh -c -- 'for file in "${@}"; do zcat "${file}" || cat "${file}" || exit; done' sh '{}' '+'
That assumes you want to interact with files with names like .hidden.txt.gz though. If you don't, and only intend to have a directory with regular files (as opposed to directories or symbolic links or other types of file), using this is much simpler and even safer, and avoids using files in a surprising order:
for i in *; do zcat -- "$i" || cat -- "$i" || exit; done
Of course, the real solution is to avoid using the Shell Command Language at all, and to carefully adapt any program to your particular problem as needed: https://sipb.mit.edu/doc/safe-shell/
Yeah, i was tired and had $file there first, then saw that you wanted to cat all in directory. Still tired, but i think this works now.
Thanks !
But still we shouldn't have to resort to this !
~~Also, can't get the output through pipe~~
for i in $(ls); do zcat $i || cat $i; done | grep mysearchterm
~~this appears to work~~
~~find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 -I{} sh -c 'zcat "{}" 2>/dev/null || cat "{}"' | grep "mysearchterm"~~
~~Still, that was a speed bump that I guess everyone dealing with mass compressed log files has to figure out on the fly because zcat can't read uncompressed files ! argg !!!~~
for i in $(ls); do zcat $i 2>/dev/null || cat $i; done | grep mysearchterm
Celeste. Are you here? In a future search maybe?
Well, the source code is available. Fix it if you need it that bad.
Man, I have a minor inconvenience.
installs Gentoo
Where is it? I can't seen to find it https://github.com/zCat?tab=repositories
It's part of GNU Gzip, and zcat is basically just a shell script that runs exec gzip -cd "$@" meaning you can actually just do cat /usr/bin/zcat to get the source.
Or even zcat -f /usr/bin/zcat