[vox-tech] reading a .gz .Z after offset

[Eric Engelhard]

Does anyone on the list have experience using perl read
(FILEHANDLE,SCALAR,LENGTH,OFFSET) to drop into compressed files (.Z and
.gz) and extract readable results? I am ignorant of both compressed file
anatomy and/or perl mods which can handle this issue. 
I currently process large reference files (up to 1.8GB compressed)
through a decompression/recompression pipe, but would like to divide and
conquer on parallel cluster nodes without having to read through the
entire file at each node.
--
Eric Engelhard - www.cvbig.org - www.sagresdiscovery.com