bzcat

Additional Notes

bzcat writes decompressed bzip2 data to standard output. It is useful for reading compressed text without creating a decompressed file on disk.

It is similar to bzip2 -dc.

Syntax

bzcat file.bz2...

Parameters

• file.bz2: bzip2-compressed file to read.
• options: Some implementations accept bzip2-style options.

Examples

bzcat access.log.bz2 | less

Read a compressed log file.

bzcat data.txt.bz2 | grep error

Search decompressed output.

bzcat archive.tar.bz2 | tar -tf -

List a tar archive compressed with bzip2.

Practical Notes

• bzcat does not remove or replace the compressed input file.
• Use bzgrep for direct searching when available.
• For huge files, pipe to tools that can stream instead of loading everything into memory.