View the list of files and directories in an archive with less.

less file.tar.gz
This will print out the files and directories in a gzipped tarball.

-1
By: allbad
2009-03-15 23:00:05
less
5
Submit An Alternative

What Others Think

Uhmm... less doesn't have the capabilities to view a binary file, which gzip files are. The following would be correct: zcat file.tar.gz | less
atoponce · 878 weeks and 5 days ago
works just fine here (kubuntu 8.04.2). Cheers for the tip.
tanguyr · 878 weeks and 5 days ago
@tanguyr You're calling zless, not less. And if you look, you'll see zless is a bash script that calls gzip, pipes the output to STDOUT, and uses less to parse the output. The 'less' binary cannot parse binary files. Only ASCII.
atoponce · 878 weeks and 4 days ago
I think the author intends to list the names of archive members and not file contents so allbad would probably want to do: tar tfz file.tar.gz | less -S On recent versions of tar, the 'z' option is no longer strictly necessary for files as compression is autodetected, but is required if input is from a pipe.
bwoodacre · 878 weeks and 3 days ago
less view-the-list-of-files-and-directories-in-an-archive-with-less..html.tar.gz :-rw-rw-r-- bashiere/bashiere 47440 2009-05-05 11:42 view-the-list-of-files-and-directories-in-an-archive-with-less..html view-the-list-of-files-and-directories-in-an-archive-with-less..html.tar.gz (END) ^Q
bashiere · 871 weeks and 4 days ago

What do you think?

Any thoughts on this command? Does it work on your machine? Can you do the same thing with only 14 characters?

You must be signed in to comment.

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

Share Your Commands

Similar Commands

List recursively current directory files/directories in vim

strip non-constant number of directories from tar archive while decompressing

Create a tar archive from a text list without trailing slash in directories

List contents of tar archive within a compressed 7zip archive

Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

Subscribe to the feed for: