Tar – How to List Files Only with Tar

tar

Fun fact: If you use Archive Manager and extract a .tar.gz so that you have "Keep directory structure" unticked, you will get a tarbomb.

tar -ztf lists all the files and directories in a tar file.
Is there a way to list all the files in a tar file, without the directory structure?

Best Answer

I don't see a way to do it from the man page, but you can always filter the results. The following assumes no newlines in your file names:

tar tzf your_archive | awk -F/ '{ if($NF != "") print $NF }'

How it works

By setting the field separator to /, the last field awk knows about ($NF) is either the file name if it's processing a file name or empty if it's processing a directory name (tar adds a trailing slash to directory names). So, we're basically telling awk to print the last field if it's not empty.

Related Solutions

tar – How to Tar Files Only, No Directories

As camh points out, the previous command had a small problem in that given too many file names, it would execute more than once, with later invocations silently wiping out the previous runs. Since we're not compressing too, we can append instead of overwrite:

find mydir -maxdepth 1 -type f -print0 | xargs -0 tar Avf mydir.tar
find mydir -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec tar Avf mydir.tar {} +

Iocnarz's answer of using tar's --null and -T options works as well. If you have cpio installed, camh's answer using it is also fine. And if you have zsh and don't mind using it for a command, Gilles's answer using a zsh glob (*(.)) seems the most straightforward.

The key was the -maxdepth option. Final answer, dealing with spaces appropriately:

find mydir -maxdepth 1 -type f -print0 | xargs -0 tar cvf mydir.tar

This should also work:

find mydir -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec tar cvf mydir.tar {} +

Tar compression without directory structure

I think you can do this with the -C option.

From the tar man page:

-C directory, --cd directory, --directory directory
    In c and r mode, this changes the directory before adding the following files.
    In x mode, change directories after opening the archive but before extracting
    entries from the archive.

This means that you should be able to run

tar cvzf result.tar.gz -C /path/to/dir1/ . -C /path/to/dir2/ .

to achieve what you want.

Best Answer

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tar – How to Tar Files Only, No Directories

Tar compression without directory structure

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