grep from tar.gz without extracting [faster one]

Am trying to grep pattern from dozen files .tar.gz but its very slow

am using

tar -ztf file.tar.gz | while read FILENAME
do
        if tar -zxf file.tar.gz "$FILENAME" -O | grep "string" > /dev/null
        then
                echo "$FILENAME contains string"
        fi
done

Solution 1:

If you have zgrep you can use

zgrep -a string file.tar.gz

Solution 2:

You can use the --to-command option to pipe files to an arbitrary script. Using this you can process the archive in a single pass (and without a temporary file). See also this question, and the manual. Armed with the above information, you could try something like:

$ tar xf file.tar.gz --to-command "awk '/bar/ { print ENVIRON[\"TAR_FILENAME\"]; exit }'"
bfe2/.bferc
bfe2/CHANGELOG
bfe2/README.bferc

Solution 3:

I know this question is 4 years old, but I have a couple different options:

Option 1: Using tar --to-command grep

The following line will look in example.tgz for PATTERN. This is similar to @Jester's example, but I couldn't get his pattern matching to work.

tar xzf example.tgz --to-command 'grep --label="$TAR_FILENAME" -H PATTERN ; true'

Option 2: Using tar -tzf

The second option is using tar -tzf to list the files, then go through them with grep. You can create a function to use it over and over:

targrep () {
    for i in $(tar -tzf "$1"); do
        results=$(tar -Oxzf "$1" "$i" | grep --label="$i" -H "$2")
        echo "$results"
    done
}

Usage:

targrep example.tar.gz "pattern"