show biggest files in tar archive?

ahz10 · 09-30-2005, 10:42 AM

I have a 1GB .tar.bz2. Does anyone know a command to sort the contents by size?

This would be the tar equivalent to something like

Code:

du | sort -rn

The problem with tar's listing is that the size isn't first.

druuna · 09-30-2005, 11:34 AM

Hi,

Does this help:

tar tvf /path/to/tar.tar | sort -k3

This will sort the output of tar tvf (ls -l alike style) and is sorted on the third field (-k3).

Hope this helps.

ahz10 · 11-04-2005, 03:26 PM

druuna,

Thanks, the -k3 is what I needed. It helps me find the biggest files in my nightly incremental backups.

By the way, sort also needs -n for natural sort.

druuna · 11-04-2005, 03:48 PM

Hi,

Your welcome

BTW: sort -n is for numeric-sort (compare according to string numerical value).
Personally I don't have to use the -n option, output is the same. But the results may differ depending on linux/unix flavor and/or different versions of sort.