Random accessing a gzip file

anmol.itbhu has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi,

I want to fetch few lines from the gzip file (of size 1 GB). since file contains lots of data so i have somehow found the start and end byte of the lines which i want to fetch from the file. please suggest how can i randomly access a gzip file when i know the start byte of the line to be fetched..
Is it possible through IO::Uncompress::Gunzip module?
Can it be done using file handling function like seek and tell?

Comment on Random accessing a gzip file

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Re: Random accessing a gzip file by grondilu (Friar) on Oct 17, 2012 at 01:05 UTC
From the manual page of IO::Uncompress::Gunzip, I read: seek `$z->seek($position, $whence); seek($z, $position, $whence);` [download] Provides a sub-set of the "seek" functionality, with the restriction that it is only legal to seek forward in the input file/buffer. It is a fatal error to attempt to seek backward. tell Usage is `$z->tell() tell $z` [download] Returns the uncompressed file offset. So yes, you can, but of course it can not be as easy as with an uncompressed file.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: Random accessing a gzip file by pmqs (Friar) on Oct 17, 2012 at 13:13 UTC
Note that the implementation of seek in IO::Uncompress::Gunzip does not provide true random access to a compressed file. It works by uncompressing data from the current offset in the file/buffer until it reaches the ucompressed offset specified in the parameters to seek. For very small files this may be acceptable behaviour. For large files it may cause an unacceptable delay.	[reply]