grep - enhancement request

[John Summerfield]

It would be a Good Thing, I think, if grep could recognise and scan the 
contents of files compressed with gzip and bzip2. Ideally it would do 
it without being told - it might be asked to search any mix of files.

Even better would be processing contents of tarballs (and ZIP archives) 
as if they were directories.

If you think it desirable to tell grep to uncompress compress files, 
then let the options --gzip --bzip2 or --decompress or whatever enable 
the feature to detect which files are compressed with bzip2, gzip or 
not compressed, not to mean that all files are to be decompressed. That 
is, decompress files that seem to be compressed, untar files that seem 
to be tarballs, unzip apparent zip archives.





-- 
Cheers
John Summerfield

Microsoft's most solid OS: http://www.geocities.com/rcwoolley/

Note: mail delivered to me is deemed to be intended for me, for my 
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