Awesome

rzgrep - grep for stuff in archives that are embedded within archives

This is a small utility, it greps through the contents of an archive file, it also greps through any archive files that are embedded within an archive file. They like to do that in java, where they have jars nested in jars.

You have also the option to decompile the contents of the class files that are include within the jar files, and to grep through them! I am using jd-core for the java decompiler.

The following archives are supported right now: zip|jar|war|ear|tar|tgz|taz|tar.gz|tbz2|tbz|tar.bz2|tar.bz I am trusting this link with the definition of these extensions link - see --auto-compress option

The utility is written in golang, you can see how to use it from the test output: The utility accepts a fixed search string, or a regular expression defined as re2 regex syntax

You can download the binary release, please put the two binaries into the same directory

What I learned from all this

I have managed to learn a bit of golang generics, a circular buffer based on generics is here, very exiting to have generics, feels like the twenty first century!

I intended to remember/pick up some golang for my job.

Also there seems to be a limit, of what can be done with shell pipelines; this task of grepping a regular expression within a nested compressed archive seems to be right on the border of what is feasible with a command line. Luckily this problem can be solved by introducing yet another command line tool...

The Utility

The options of the utility

The test output