Re: Random accessing a gzip file

From the manual page of IO::Uncompress::Gunzip, I read:

seek

           $z->seek($position, $whence);
           seek($z, $position, $whence);
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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
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Returns the uncompressed file offset.

So yes, you can, but of course it can not be as easy as with an uncompressed file.

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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]