You have the comment:

Code:

# The script now reads the file ports2.txt and sorts the data into 4 files based on it finding "Inbound or Outbound" and "TCP or UDP" in the line.

but there is no ports2.txt anywhere in your script. Do you care about having the file GC_ports.txt, or do you really just need the four GC_(tcp|udp)(in|out)bound.txt files that are created from this file?

Assuming you have more than one compressed file that is less than a week old, using -exec zcat {} + will be faster than -exec zcat {} \; and you could replace all four awk scripts and the sed script with a single awk script (which would considerably reduce the time spent reading and writing data that should only need to be read once and written at most twice; instead of reading the data five times and writing it six or seven times).

But, I would guess (hard to make any sound judgements here with no samples of the data being processed) that the bulk of the time being spent in this script is in compressing and recompressing relatively large files for your archives. And if you just need the files that you are splitting out of GC_ports.txt, the time spent creating, compressing, and archiving that unneeded file could be significant.

Can you show us some sample uncompressed data that is being pushed through the pipeline by find ... -exec zcat {} \;? Figuring out exactly what that pipeline is doing without knowing where the slashes and colons are makes it hard to feel confident about suggesting ways to streamline your awk and sed scripts.

Even though echo is a shell built-in, invoking echo four times in a row instead of calling printf (another shell built-in) once is inefficient. (Depending on what operating system you're using, you could probably produce the same output with a single echo instead of a single printf, but I prefer print since its formatting options are more portable.) Do you really want/need that many empty lines in the output produced by this script?