would something like this work? I am assuming you are on a system where zcat works on .Z and .gz files. For other compressions use corresponding utility and pipe it to Perl.

cheers

SK Update: Here is a snippet. Sorry I couldn't get the file reading and matching in one line :(

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
my $myfile = "test.gz";

open(IN,"zcat $myfile|") or die "Cannot open file: $myfile\n";

while (<IN>) {
    print ($_) if /mymatch/;
}
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Since I'm a big fan of both lexical filehandles, and the safer forms of piping open, here's a version that uses both of those:

use strict;
use warnings;

open my $infh, "-|", zcat => $myfile
  or die "Cannot open file: $myfile\n";

while (<$infh>) {
    print if /mymatch/;
}
[download]

This avoids using a global filehandle, and would allow you to take the filename in as a command line argument, without worrying about escaping nasty characters. I think it's a pretty big benefit for a fairly small change in the code.

That works! I was wrestling with Compress:Zlib, but I kept getting "insufficient memory" errors, even on a much smaller test file.

Thanks!