Command Line – How to View Contents of tar.gz File Without Extracting

command line

I want to see the contents (list of files and folders) of an archive, for example a tar.gz file without extracting it.

Are there any methods for doing that?

Run the below command in the terminal to see the contents of a tar.gz file without extracting it:

tar -tf filename.tar.gz

screenshot of listing compressed tarball files in the terminal

-t, --list
List the contents of an archive. Arguments are optional. When given, they specify the names of the members to list.

-f, --file=ARCHIVE Use archive file or device ARCHIVE...

Use

 tar -xvzf filename.tar.gz --strip-components=1

--strip-components=1 tells tar to strip the first path component (the drupal-7.15/ in your case) from each file when unpacking.

This creates a CSV file listing.csv with file name, time stamp and size for all files in /some/folder/ and its subfolders:

find /some/folder -printf '"%P";"%Tc";"%s";\n' > listing.csv

See the documentation for -printf in the manpage for find if you want to use other fields.

Note that it doesn't work for file names containing " characters.