Is there some method to find, from the shell, all files matching a file pattern including those inside archives (specifically: zip archives)?

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The simulation package "VASP" produces files called "OUTCAR" amongst others. Those files are now distributed over hundreds of folders, most but not all of them, zipped to speed up incremental backups by reducing file clutter. I now want to run as script on all those zipped and non-zipped OUTCAR files. 

Of course I could write a script that uses "find" to find the unzipped files and a combination of find, grep and unzip to find the zipped files, but a standard solution, if any, would be preferred, as it would allow to easily treat zip files like readonly-folders across my scripts.

Ideally there would be a set of commands emulating the behaviour of common shell commands like `cat`, `grep`, `find` except that they allow zip files as part of file names. 

I would not require such tools to be able to handle nested zip files. The very reason I switched from `.tar.gz` to `.zip` is the existence of a file index accessible without extracting anything (quite a speed difference for 100 MB archives with high compression) which is partially lost when nested archives are involved.

On a side note, I am using Windows 7 with Cygwin (though that should make a difference only regarding the performance of process creation).