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Table of Contents

• Finding files in tar archives
• Extracting one file from a tar archive

This is a small tip, to find specific files in tar archives and how to extract those specific files from said archive. Usefull when you have a 2 GB large tar file with millions of small files, and you need just one.

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Finding files in tar archives

Using the command line flags -ft (long flags are --file --list) we can list the contents of an archive. Using grep you can search that list for the correct file. Example:

tar -ft large_file.tar.gz | grep "the-filename-you-want"

Output:

"full-path/to-the-file/in-the-archive/the-filename-you-want"

With a modern tar on modern linux you can omit the flags for compressed archives and just pass a .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 file directly.

Extracting one file from a tar archive

When extracting a tar archive, you can specify the filename of the file you want (full path, use the command above to find it), as the second command line option. Example:

tar -xf large_file.tar.gz "full-path/to-the-file/in-the-archive/the-filename-you-want"

It might just take a long time, at least for my 2 GB file it took a while.

An alternative is to use "mc" (midnight commander), which can open archive files just a a local folder.

Tags: archive , bash , grep , shell , snippets , tar