tar keeps running
 

if I do the following:

the file is found, but tar keeps running. Does it continue to search the entire tape (it's a 40Gig tar file)? If so, is there a way to make it stop right after it finds the first match?

thanks
manuel

tar files can contain multiple occurrences of a file, so by default it will scan right to the end of the file to report subsequent instances of the file if they exist. You can tell GNU tar (not sure about other implementations) to report just one occurrance using the --occurrance option. This is documented in the info pages (but not the debian man page, which is incomplete).

This should list the first --occurrence of home/mydirectory/folder/myfile.txt and then terminate without scanning the rest of the archive.

Notice that the --occurrence option can take a numerical argument. For example, to list the third occurrance of the file, use

If you don't specify the number, it defaults to 1.