How do you view a sql.gz file as plain text SQL from the command line?
I want to read the SQL statements stored in a .sql.gz file, from the command line on the server. I've tried tar -xzvf, but get tar: This does not look like a tar archive. cat returns garbage because it's compressed.
gunzip -c <filename> | less
or
zcat <filename> | less
lesspipe preprocessor, you should be able to invoke less directly on a .gz file and have the decompression handled behind the scenes - see man lesspipe
zcat file.sql.gz will output the file to stdout, which then can be combined with grep or more or less etc.
Much of the time, and probably in this case, just plain less will do the right thing. This uses the so-called less preprocessor. So, do
less file.sql.gz
This won't actually write the file in plain text to the filesytem; it is for your viewing pleasure only, but much of the time that is enough. I personally find the less preprocesor quite useful. It saves me from remembering a bunch of commands. On Debian, at least, the less preprocessor is /usr/bin/lesspipe. This is a shell script. This location of this can possibly be found by checking the value of the enviroment variable LESSOPEN. e.g.
echo $LESSOPEN
|/usr/bin/lesspipe %s
The relevant part of this script for just a gzipped text file is:
# Note that this is out of alpha order so that we don't catch
# the gzipped tar files.
*.gz|*.z|*.dz)
gzip -dc "$1" ;;
This is with less version 444-4 on Debian wheezy.
