Search all tar.gz files in subdirectories for file
 

I have subfolders of 365 tar.gz files from a webserver across the span of a year. I now need to search all of these tar.gz files for the most recent copy of a few php files. I tried this, but I'm not getting the desired results (the command comes back with Not found in archive, when I know it is):

But if I cd to 20120324 and do the same command, I get all kinds of matches (as expected). What am I missing in this simple line? Thanks!

After the shell filename expansion, your tar command results in something like:
The name of the archive to test is that one highlighted in blue and given as argument of the -f option. The other names are arguments of the tar command and they are searched inside the previous archive. If you use -x instead of -t, this mechanism serves to extract only some files from a given archive.

If you want to look for a file inside multiple archives, better to use a loop, e.g.
As you can see, the grep command is not necessary, since we want to look for php files inside the archive, hence we pass them as arguments. The --wildcars option is necessary to enable pattern matching with *. Hope this helps.

aaaaah, ok. I see what you're saying. That's why I was getting a huge list of tar files not found except for the first day, because it was searching in that file, but then also searching in that file for every subdirectory. Makes sense. Thanks for the explanation and assistance!