bash seek file name inside tar ball

Question

Here I have test.tar.gz file, it's structure like:

folder/
folder/folder1
folder/folder1/aa
folder/folder1/bb
folder/folder2
folder/folder2/cc

Is there a way to find the name of first-level folder?

Which name in that output do you want to find? Also how large is the tarball? — Etan Reisner, Jul 23 '14 at 17:22

Sylvain Leroux · Accepted Answer · 2014-07-23T17:56:38.950

For simple cases, what about:

tar tf archive.tar | head -1

... however tar archives are not necessary "single rooted":

sh$ mkdir -p folder/folder1
sh$ mkdir -p folder/folder2
sh$ touch folder/folder1/{aa,bb}
sh$ touch folder/folder2/cc
sh$ mkdir -p other/folder3
sh$ touch other/folder3/dd
sh$ mkdir -p yet/an/other
sh$ tar cvf f.tar folder other yet/an
folder/
folder/folder1/
folder/folder1/aa
folder/folder1/bb
folder/folder2/
folder/folder2/cc
other/
other/folder3/
other/folder3/dd
yet/an/
yet/an/other/

In addition, please note in the above example, the last entries: there is the sub-folder but not the root one.

In such case, you might extract the various "roots":

sh$ tar tf f.tar | sed -n '/^[^/]*\/$/p'
folder/
other/

If you need "unrooted" files too, this is more complicated:

sh$ $ tar tf f.tar | sed -n '/^.*\/$/p' | sort | cut -d '/' -f 1 | uniq
folder
other
yet

The sort is not strictly necessary in my example, but it helps if you have an incremental archive.

It should probably be pointed out that sorting this way means no output will be generated until the entire tar archive has been scanned. — Etan Reisner, Jul 23 '14 at 17:57
@EtanReisner Very correct. This might be an issue for very long archives and/or on very constrained hardware. — Sylvain Leroux, Jul 23 '14 at 18:00

konsolebox · Answer 2 · 2014-07-23T18:39:50.247

3

Using awk:

tar -tf bash-4.0.tar.gz | awk -F / 'NF > 1 && !a[$1]++ { print $1 FS }'

Output:

bash-4.0/

edited Jul 23 '14 at 18:39

answered Jul 23 '14 at 17:54

konsolebox

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@SylvainLeroux I doubt that's possible. But for extremists they can have `awk -F / 'NF <= 2 && $2 == ""'`. – konsolebox Jul 23 '14 at 17:58
1

It is entirely possible. I was just testing that myself and was about to post that updated awk script. – Etan Reisner Jul 23 '14 at 18:00
Thanks for all the ideas. I just made a general answer to it instead. – konsolebox Jul 23 '14 at 18:34

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:58

Yes! Take a look Here

tar tvf scripts.tar | awk -F/ '{if (NF<4) print }'


drwx------ glens/glens       0 2010-03-17 10:44 scripts/
-rwxr--r-- glens/www-data 1051 2009-07-27 10:42 scripts/my2cnf.pl
-rwxr--r-- glens/www-data  359 2009-08-14 00:01 scripts/pastebin.sh
-rwxr--r-- glens/www-data  566 2009-07-27 10:42 scripts/critic.pl
-rwxr-xr-x glens/glens     981 2009-12-16 09:39 scripts/wiki_sys.pl
-rwxr-xr-x glens/glens    3072 2009-07-28 10:25 scripts/blacklist_update.pl
-rwxr--r-- glens/www-data 18418 2009-07-27 10:42 scripts/sysinfo.pl

Make sure to note, that the number is 3+ however many levels you want, because of the / in the username/group. If you just do

tar tf scripts.tar | awk -F/ '{if (NF<3) print }'

scripts/
scripts/my2cnf.pl
scripts/pastebin.sh
scripts/critic.pl
scripts/wiki_sys.pl
scripts/blacklist_update.pl
scripts/sysinfo.pl

it's only two more.

Piping output of `ls` is indicative of bad practices in general; see http://mywiki.wooledge.org/ParsingLs — Charles Duffy, Jul 23 '14 at 17:37

bash seek file name inside tar ball

3 Answers3