How to get few lines from a .gz compressed file without uncompressing

Question

How to get the first few lines from a gziped file ? I tried zcat, but its throwing an error

zcat CONN.20111109.0057.gz|head
CONN.20111109.0057.gz.Z: A file o         


        

Answer 1

This awk snippet will let you show not only the first few lines - but a range you can specify. It will also add line numbers which i needed for debugging an error message pointing to a certain line way down in a gzipped file.

gunzip -c file.gz | awk -v from=10 -v to=20 'NR>=from { print NR,$0; if (NR>=to) exit 1}'

Here is the awk snippet used in the one liner above. In awk NR is a built-in variable (Number of records found so far) which usually is equivalent to a line number. the from and to variable are picked up from the command line via the -v options.

NR>=from {
   print NR,$0; 
   if (NR>=to) 
     exit 1
}