Hello list,
This is my first post here, so apologies in advance for whatever I get
wrong.
I am asking for an enhancement to zcat, that it should silently ignore
empty files, either always, or (if that conflicts with POSIX or some
other standard), by a command line option.
My use case is as follows:
I maintain a server, and have occasion to scan log files for specific items.
As is typical in a logrotate environment, the files are something like
xyz.log current
xyz.log.1 previous
xyz.log.2.gz
xyz.log.3.gz etc etc
Most of the time I can search for something by
zgrep 'target' xyz*
But, wanting to further process a number of entries, I tried the obvious
zcat xyz* | awk ...
which results in
gzip: xyz.log.1: unexpected end of file
I note that it correctly handles archives with no content (just the 20
byte header)
Regards,
Peter
