zegrep

Search for pattern in gzipped file

$ zegrep "[pattern]" [file.gz]

$ zegrep -i "[pattern]" [file.gz]

$ zegrep -n "[pattern]" [file.gz]

$ zegrep "[pattern]" [file1.gz] [file2.gz]

$ zegrep "[foo|bar]+" [file.gz]

zegrep [grep-options] [-e] pattern [file...]

zegrep searches for patterns in gzip-compressed files without manually decompressing them. It's equivalent to zcat file.gz | egrep pattern but more convenient.
The "e" indicates extended regular expression support, same as grep -E. This allows patterns with +, ?, |, and () without escaping.
zegrep automatically detects whether input files are compressed. Uncompressed files are searched normally, making it safe to use on mixed file sets.
Multiple patterns can be specified with -e or by separating with | in the pattern.

-i

Case-insensitive matching

Show line numbers

List filenames with matches only

Count matching lines

Invert match (show non-matching lines)

Suppress filename in output

Specify pattern (useful for patterns starting with -)

zegrep decompresses files to search them, which uses CPU. For large compressed files, this may be slow.
Only gzip compression is supported. For other formats, use bzgrep (bzip2), xzgrep (xz), or zstdgrep (zstd).
Memory usage scales with decompressed file size as the file must be processed through the decompressor.
On some systems, zegrep is a script wrapper around zcat and egrep.

zgrep(1), zfgrep(1), zcat(1), grep(1), egrep(1), gzip(1)