According to my filesystem, there once used to be a /bin/gzcat "binary" (rather, a symlink). Having a look at http://www.portagefilelist.de/index.php/Special:PFLQuery?dir=&package=&full_file=&file=gzcat&version=&pflquery=submitted I see that this must have been dropped after gzip 1.3.5. In current gzip releases, there's now /bin/zcat. It would be nice, if both (zcat and gzcat) could be provided.
it was dropped because no one else was providing it (dont get me wrong, i liked it myself too) ... but utilizing it leads to scripts which only work on Gentoo and people dont even realize it i would send a request to bug-gzip@gnu.org to see if they'd consider including it
gzip provides zcat. In the gzip man page you find, that zcat might be called gzcat: zcat is identical to gunzip -c. (On some systems, zcat may be installed as gzcat to preserve the original link to compress.) zcat Because of that, I doubt that the gzip guys will provide a gzcat "binary" (link, shell script or whatever). If a gzcat "program" would be provided, scripts might utilize it and thus would actually work on more than just Gentoo (or Linux, for that matter). For example, in Solaris 10 (or OpenSolaris), you find a "proper" zcat, which uses compress and a gzcat, which uses gzip. So, such scripts would be even more portable. And actually, if I'd write a portable script, I'd first check for gzcat and only if it does not exist, I'd resort to zcat, because zcat doesn't have to be the one from gzip. This means, as far as portability is concerned, a gzcat would be a PLUS, while /only/ having a zcat is a MINUS (and no, it doesn't matter much, that other Linux distributions behave equally bad).
This is easily worked around with an alias: alias gzcat='gunzip -c'
