Decompress partially a gzipped file until a certain length?

[nitnerolf]

I do not know if this is the right place to post such a message.

I am part of a project which uses gzipped fits files (the AMBER instrument
for those who are interested: http://amber.obs.ujf-grenoble.fr ) and up to
now, we made a code which uses the cfitsio library to read sequentially
files headers. However, cfitsio does work on gzipped files, but loads them
completely in memory before reading any header keyword. Since we are dealing
sometimes with files of hundreds of megabytes, the whole process can be very
long.

Seeking for a workaround to speedup that process, I have seen that gzip
(with zcat) allows one to read the compressed fits headers and dump them to
stdout, as they are written in ASCII format. This might be interesting for
this application. However I have not found any option nor possibility to
stop the decompression after a given decompressed length has been reached.
Therefore I would like to know if it is possible to decompress a file until
a certain length with gzip or zcat, and if not, if there might be a
workaround to do that.

Thanks in advance for your answer!
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