How to substitute in a large gz file?

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

I have a large .gz file where i wish to replace the occurrence of a particular word with another word.. Can anyone help?I prefer a short script..

Can sed work with gz files?

2

As far as I know, You have to gunzip the file. since you want to edit the file contents.

gunzip the file.
do your things.
gzip it back.

3

That is correct. You can combine the operations in a pipeline though:

gunzip < file.gz | sed -e 's/search_str/replace_str/g' | gzip -c > temp.gz
mv temp.gz file.gz
1 Like
4

this will also work

gunzip ur_file.gz | awk 's/ur_string/replace_string/g' | gzip -c final.gz
mv final.gz ur_xfile.gz
5

why gunzip , try using

gzcat filename.gz | sed 's/MATCH/REPLACE/g' |gzip -c output.gz
6

Because a) it's the same thing, b) people will have it. My system calls it zcat not gzcat, and on closer inspection, it's just a shell script that does exec gunzip -c "$@" . Many systems don't have either. So you're not saving anything by using gzcat and causing more problems.