Frequently, you will find yourself wanting to determine exactly what a particular archive contains. You can use the --list (-t) operation to get the member names as they currently appear in the archive, as well as various attributes of the files at the time they were archived. For example, you can examine the archive collection.tar that you created in the last section with the command,
$ tar --list --file=collection.tar
The output of tar
would then be:
blues folk jazz
The archive bfiles.tar would list as follows:
./birds baboon ./box
Be sure to use a --file=archive-name (-f archive-name) option just as with --create (-c) to specify the name of the archive.
If you use the --verbose (-v) option with
--list, then tar
will print out a listing
reminiscent of ‘ls -l’, showing owner, file size, and so
forth. This output is described in detail in verbose member listing.
If you had used --verbose (-v) mode, the example above would look like:
$ tar --list --verbose --file=collection.tar folk -rw-r--r-- myself/user 62 1990-05-23 10:55 folk
It is important to notice that the output of tar --list
--verbose does not necessarily match that produced by tar
--create --verbose while creating the archive. It is because
GNU tar
, unless told explicitly not to do so, removes some directory
prefixes from file names before storing them in the archive
(See absolute, for more information). In other
words, in verbose mode GNU tar
shows file names when creating
an archive and member names when listing it. Consider this
example:
$ tar --create --verbose --file archive /etc/mail tar: Removing leading `/' from member names /etc/mail/ /etc/mail/sendmail.cf /etc/mail/aliases $ tar --test --file archive etc/mail/ etc/mail/sendmail.cf etc/mail/aliases
This default behavior can sometimes be inconvenient. You can force
GNU tar
show member names when creating archive by supplying
--show-stored-names option.
Print member (as opposed to file) names when creating the archive.
You can specify one or more individual member names as arguments when
using ‘list’. In this case, tar
will only list the
names of members you identify. For example, tar --list --file=afiles.tar apple would only print apple.
Because tar
preserves file names, these must be specified as
they appear in the archive (i.e., relative to the directory from which
the archive was created). Therefore, it is essential when specifying
member names to tar
that you give the exact member names.
For example, tar --list --file=bfiles.tar birds would produce an
error message something like ‘tar: birds: Not found in archive’,
because there is no member named birds, only one named
./birds. While the names birds and ./birds name
the same file, member names by default are compared verbatim.
However, tar --list --file=bfiles.tar baboon would respond with baboon, because this exact member name is in the archive file bfiles.tar. If you are not sure of the exact file name, use globbing patterns, for example:
$ tar --list --file=bfiles.tar --wildcards '*b*'
will list all members whose name contains ‘b’. See wildcards,
for a detailed discussion of globbing patterns and related
tar
command line options.
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