How To List Archive File Contents Of Tar Tar Gz Tar Bz2 Tar Xz Tecadmin

List Archive File Contents (Quick Commands)

The -t switch is used for list content of a tarball file without extract. Below is the quick commands used to list .tar, .tar.gz, .tar.bz2 and .tar.xz file contents.

List .tar File Content

Use -t switch with tar command to list content of a archive.tar file without actually extracting. You can see that output is pretty similar to the result of ls -l command. [Sample Output]

List .tar.gz File Content

We use -z switch for handling .tar.gz files and use -t for the listing of archive file content. See below example to list an archive.tar.gz file contents without extracting the file. [Sample Output]

List .tar.bz2 File Content

We use -j switch for handling tar.bz2 files and use -t for the listing of archive file content. See below example to list an archive.tar.bz2 file contents without extracting the file. [Sample Output]

List .tar.xz File Content

We use -J (capital J) switch for handling tar.xz files and use -t for the listing of archive file content. See below example to list an archive.tar.xz file contents without extracting the file. [Sample Output]