Did you try Smile? Its readtext - and probably its find text - expand some files on the fly, I think. 

Emmanuel

On May 11, 2012, at 8:43 PM, L. Lee wrote:

> Yesterday, I came across an Apple knowledge base article
> (http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4272) that appeared to me to state that under
> certain circumstances, passwords might be stored in clear text in some log
> files. So I started thinking about a command line that might be used to
> return a list of log files, compressed or not, that might contain a unique,
> exact fragment of a password.
> 
> To test my script, I found a file (/private/var/log/AppleJack.log.0.bz)
> that, when I decompressed and opened it in TextWrangler, appeared to contain
> the string "8CFCE322A9CB".
> 
> Why isn't "/var/log/AppleJack.log.0.bz" returned in the results of  the
> following terminal command on my system? What terminal command could I use
> instead to search for "8CFCE322A9CB" in text or .bz files in
> /private/var/log that would include "/var/log/AppleJack.log.0.bz" in its
> results?
> 
> sudo find /private/var/log -exec bzgrep -q "8CFCE322A9CB" '{}' \; -print
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Laine Lee