Performing grep operation in tar files without extracting

Question

I have list of files which contain particular patterns, but those files have been tarred. Now I want to search for the pattern in the tar file, and to know which files conta

Answer 1

The command zgrep should do exactly what you want, directly.

for example

zgrep "mypattern" *.gz

http://linux.about.com/library/cmd/blcmdl1_zgrep.htm