Hey all,

Does anyone know how to list the contents of a .tar.gz, without first uncompressing? using gzip only reports back the foo.tar, and tar doesn't recognise foo.tar.gz as a valid tar archive.

Can this be done? It could save me a lot of time uncompressing big tar's full of data to find the right file.

Thanks in advance,

Justin

use the -t option

Using just the -t option wont show the contents of tar.gz or tar.bz2 archives. You have to filter them further thru gzip or bzip. For example, to see the contents you will do:
for tar file: tar -tvf foo.tar
for gzip file: tar -ztvf foo.tar.gz
for bz file: tar -jtvf foo.tar.bz

Check it out for yourself!

less foo.tar.gz

Midnight Commander will let you browse the contents of an archive as if it were a directory (in a sense...it actually just extracts it to a temp directory).

This will only show junk on the console. He wants to display the list of files in the tarball. Not the binary contents!

So....I win?

Please dont confuse other members. You concatenated two of my posts showing that I am contradicting myself!
I wasnt contradicting my original post. That's the simplest way to do it. I was saying doing a
will throw junk on the screen.
Of course, mc is very convenient to browse thru tarballs. I do agree with u on that. But doing a
or displays the same without the need of installing mc.

Regards,
Bhaskar.

bhaskie,

You are a legend! Thanks, a very simple and well explained solution, that is already saving me time.

How could someone resist the temptation to install Midnight Commander and why should they??????
An Introduction to the Midnight Commander
Midnight Commander home page

Sorry...I was just being silly. You pointed out the shortcomings of the other two suggestions, but no flaw in mine....so naturally I'd assumed that I won

And why should I weld myself to "DOS" tools ?

Hey relax! I get your point.It was just that someone reading the post will get the idea that the command I suggested will throw junk at the screen. I didnt want anyone to get a wrong idea. That's all.

Now that you want me to prove that my method is subtler and simpler than yours, here's my answer!

MC (midnight commander) creates a temp directory in /tmp as /tmp/mc-root (assuming you are root). So if you click on a tarball in mc, it extracts the tarball to that temp directory. Thus you get to view the contents of the archive.
Now that is ok for a small archive. Imagine what's goin to happen when you click on the kernel sources tarball or some other archive >100MB. Thats goin to take a really long time. You can click on a tarball in MC and open a console, check in /tmp/mc-<username>/<som_folder>/some_file. Do a "file foo" on that file and it will show a tar archive.

Also, this defeats the main purpose of this thread.

The guy asked a method to view contents of an archive without decompressing. MC no doubt is good but defeats the purpose! Why not keep it simple?

P.S. I am not trying to start a war here. Just helping out fellow linuxers.

Regards,
Bhaskar.

Very true....I see your point.

Hi,

tar -ztvf file.tar.gz
lists only the top-level directories & files. Is there a way to list the contents of a tar file recursively.

I need to analyze the disk space used across the directory structure