Check:

• Reading contents of a zip file without opening it.
• search for a pattern in file without opening the file.
• get the line of ith occurrence of '>' without OPENING THE FILE
.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $lines = 0;
my $filename = '/path/to/tar.gz';
die "Can't open '${filename}': $!" unless open FILE, $filename;
while (sysread FILE, my $buffer, 4096) {
               $lines += ($buffer =~ tr/\n//);
}
close FILE;
[download]

Thanks for the reply Khen! But would a "open FILE...." statement work fine to open a zip file (.gz)? i.e., I can just read the zip file as if it were a normal text file using the very same set of operations/commands?

Unfortunately, no. The script can count newlines, but opening and reading the zipped file is a different thing altogether.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Archive::Extract;

my $ae = Archive::Extract->new( archive =>  '/path/to/Archive-Extract-
+0.38.tar.gz' );
my $ok  = $ae->extract( to => '/path/to/Archive-Extract' );
my $files = $ae->files;
my $outdir = $ae->extract_path;
$ae->is_tgz;
print $outdir, "\n";
chdir($outdir);

my $lines = 0;
my $filename = 'README';

die "Can't open '${filename}': $!" unless open FILE, $filename;
while (sysread FILE, my $buffer, 4096) {
               $lines += ($buffer =~ tr/\n//);
}
close FILE;
print "$lines\n";
[download]

Man, perl monks are awesome. I don't even need this information, but it's so cool to see great solutions provided.

Thank you, rementis.