How to unzip only the first few lines of a zip archive?

Question

I have a zipped text file a.zip I want to read the first 10 lines of it. Is it possible to do that without unzipping the whole file?

Answer 1

This simple pipe-script works for me:

zcat a.zip | head -n 10

Here:

• zcat a.zip - unpacks zip-archive and sends its contents to standard output
• | pipes zcat output to head input
• head -n 10 - shows first 10 lines from its standard input