But in none of those cases will grep's directory recursion be known by gzip
Oh yeah, of course. Silly me. Trying to make zgrep support the entire set of grep's current (and future) directory recursion capability is involved. I can't disagree, although I personally have never cared about all the filtering and other grep options, just desired a straight -r. This is one of those good examples of why file-finding should never have been added to grep. I can't disagree, as a matter of principle. It makes everything more complicated. Yes ... but hugely, hugely, convenient. Despite the "wrong"ness of it, I use grep -r a lot, and greatly appreciate it. And I would greatly appreciate zgrep -r too. But I agree that it would be irrational to implement it as such. I guess I'll make some little shell script for myself. Or get used to running M-x grep-find. Or something. Thanks, Karl