List the contents of a tar or tar.gz file

by Vivek Gite on September 28, 2006 · 14 comments

Q. How do I list the contents of a tar or tar.gz file?

A. GNU/tar is an archiving program designed to store and extract files from an archive file known as a tarfile. You can create a tar file or compressed tar file tar. However sometime you need to list the contents of a tar or tar.gz file on screen before extracting the all files.

Task: List the contents of a tar file

Use the following command:
$ tar -tvf file.tar

Task: List the contents of a tar.gz file

Use the following command:
$ tar -ztvf file.tar.gz

Task: List the contents of a tar.bz2 file

Use the following command:
$ tar -jtvf file.tar.bz2

Where,

t: List the contents of an archive
v: Verbosely list files processed (display detailed information)
z: Filter the archive through gzip so that we can open compressed (decompress) .gz tar file
j: Filter archive through bzip2, use to decompress .bz2 files.
f filename: Use archive file called filename

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{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Shashi September 2, 2008: Thanks a lot Vivek…This article is very useful for me….
Reply
2 Bolser September 15, 2008: Perfect!
I don’t know why I always forget this!
Also the ‘j’ trick is killer! I always just try to use ‘z’, and then give up when bzip won’t play. Now I just need to remember … use j in stead of z when bzip.
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3 jitedar December 24, 2008: great and thx..
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4 asd January 25, 2009: thanks!
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5 Amit Verma June 3, 2009: Rule of Thumb -
{
Use ‘z’ while compressing/decompressing/listing the file with GZIP.
Use ‘j’ while compressing/decompressing/listing the file with BZIP2.
}
- with tar command.
Thanks
Amit Verma
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6 Jeremy July 16, 2009: The exact thing I was looking for, worked like a charm! :)
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7 Ankur Sinha August 27, 2009: Good Work!!!
Thanks!!!
keep it up!!!
;)
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8 Nomaun Khan September 22, 2009: Thanks for the helpful contests
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9 kiran October 23, 2009: Thanks a lot for this post guys …:)
Keep it up …
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10 Chris Henley February 16, 2010: thanks. I’m too lazy to read the man page.
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11 ode September 8, 2010: $ tar -tvf file.tar works for all three file formats.
$ unzip -l works for zip files
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12 Stefan July 17, 2011: Thanks it works fine however do you know if there is a faster way maybe? I have a 6GB gzip file and it takes ages to list the contents. For smaller files it is ok but for big files it is a pain.
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13 Fixticks July 21, 2011: man pages are too long, thanks vivek.
@Stefan, u cud try
tar -ztvf file.tar.gz > files.txt
now i assume u may be looking for a certain file in that big gzip, so
cat files.txt | grep certain_file_name_or_part_of_it
and u can now check for multiple names without the initial wait of listing the big gz’s files.
I know this coz i have just done it thanks to reading this blog.thx again Vivek.
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14 Liban November 25, 2011: I’m trying to find and display, but this isn’t working for me..
find -name “.gz” | tar -tvf {};
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