List what is in a tar file

About the author Sam U I am a professional graphics designer with over 6 years of experience. Currently doing research in virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality. I hardly watch movies but love to read tech related books and articles. Tar is a widely used utility to collect files and creating archives out of them. Sam U I am a professional graphics designer with over 6 years of experience.

View all posts. How can I view the contents of tar. Ask Question. Asked 7 years, 10 months ago. Active 1 year, 3 months ago. Viewed k times. Are there any methods for doing that? Improve this question.

Avinash Raj Avinash Raj Use vim to browse into the files — ako. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes.

Improve this answer. Elijah Lynn 3, 3 3 gold badges 25 25 silver badges 37 37 bronze badges. The manpage doesn't mention standard-input at all; and this reference seems to match my findings. Tree 1. Show 4 more comments. You can also use vim vim filename. This is awesome. You can also see the contents of the files! When you open de file with vim vim file. With huge archive you just have to be patient.

It can be very long to load folder structure. TimothyPulliam :q exits the current file and brings you back to the file list — ahota. Didn't work for me. Displayed as a binary file. You sure you don't have an alias with special options for less that you're not showing here? I just tried that to see, but it didn't work. I don't have any aliases setup for less. You could use the z command: zcat , zless , zgrep. To view a files content use: zcat file.

When a pipe is employed, which is the case here, the operating system creates streams on both sides of the pipe and synchronizes production and consumption of data. The list of files could be infinite. Only the last subset would be in the archive, as it would be created anew for each tar execution. Just wonder if this would work 'cat mylist. With 'tar rf' files are appended to archive.

So the example would read tar -cvf allfiles. Jan Jan 5 5 silver badges 12 12 bronze badges. Cassiano Bucci Cassiano Bucci 51 1 1 silver badge 1 1 bronze badge. How do you tar and not include full path? Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password. Post as a guest Name. Email Required, but never shown. The Overflow Blog.

Podcast Explaining the semiconductor shortage, and how it might end. Does ES6 make JavaScript frameworks obsolete? Featured on Meta. Now live: A fully responsive profile. Linked