How to search for a string in JAR files

My application is built on Java EE.

I have approximately 50 jars in this application.

Is it possible to search for a particular keyword (actually I want to search for a keyword BEGIN REQUEST )?

You can use zipgrep on Linux or OSX:

zipgrep "BEGIN REQUEST" file.jar

If you wish to search a number of jars, do

find libdir -name "*.jar" -exec zipgrep "BEGIN REQUEST" '{}' \;

where libdir is a directory containing all jars. The command will recursively search subdirectories too.

For windows, you can download cygwin and install zipgrep under it: http://www.cygwin.com/

Edit 1

To view the name of the file that the expression was found you could do,

find libdir -name "*.jar" | xargs -I{} sh -c 'echo searching in "{}"; zipgrep "BEGIN REQUEST" {}'

Edit 2

Simpler version of Edit 1

find libdir -name "*.jar" -print -exec zipgrep "BEGIN REQUEST" '{}' \;

Caution: This is not an accurate answer, it's only a quick heuristic approach. If you need to find something like the name of a class (e.g., which jar has class Foo?) or maybe a method name, then this may work.

grep --text 'your string' your.jar

This will search the jar file as if it were text. This is quicker because it doesn't expand the archive, but that is also why it is less accurate. If you need to be exhaustive then this is not the approach you should use, but if you want to try something a little quicker before pulling out zipgrep this is a good approach.

---

From man grep,

> -a, --text > Process a binary file as if it were text; this is equivalent > to the --binary-files=text option.

in android i had to search both jar and aar files for a certain string i was looking for here is my implementation on mac:

find . -name "*.jar" -o -name "*.aar" | xargs -I{} zipgrep "AssestManager" {}

essentially finds all jars and aar files in current direclty (and find command is recursive by default) pipes the results to zipgrep and applies each file name as a parameter via xargs. the brackets at the end tell xargs where to put the file name you got from the find command. if you want to search the entire home directory just change the find . to find ~

Searching inside a jar or finding the class name which contains a particular text is very easy with WinRar search. Its efficient and always worked for me atleast.

just open any jar in WinRar, click on ".." until you reach the top folder from where you want to start the search(including subfolders).

Make sure to check the below options:

1.) Provide '*' in fields 'file names to find', 'Archive types'

2.) select check boxes 'find in subfolders', 'find in files', 'find in archives'.

One-liner solution that prints file names for which the search string is found, it doesn't jam your console with unnecessary "searching in" logs::

find libdir -wholename "*.jar" | xargs --replace={} bash -c 'zipgrep "BEGIN REQUEST" {} &>/dev/null; [ $? -eq 0 ] && echo "{}";'

Edit:: Removing unnecessary if statement, and using -name instead of -wholename (actually, I used wholename, but it depends on your scenario and preferences)::

find libdir -name "*.jar" | xargs --replace={} bash -c 'zipgrep "BEGIN REQUEST" {} &>/dev/null && echo "{}";'

You can also use sh instead of bash. One last thing, --replace={} is just equivalent to -I{} (I usually use long option formats, to avoid having to go into the manual again later).

Fastjar - very old, but fit your needs. Fastjar contains tool called jargrep (or grepjar). Used the same way as grep:

>  locate .jar | grep hibernate | xargs grepjar -n 'objectToSQLString'

org/hibernate/type/EnumType.class:646:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/sql/Update.class:576:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/sql/Insert.class:410:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/usertype/EnhancedUserType.class:22:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/persister/entity/SingleTableEntityPersister.class:2713:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/hql/classic/WhereParser.class:1910:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/hql/ast/tree/JavaConstantNode.class:344:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/hql/ast/tree/BooleanLiteralNode.class:240:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/hql/ast/util/LiteralProcessor.class:1363:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/BigIntegerType.class:114:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/ShortType.class:189:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/TimeType.class:307:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/CharacterType.class:210:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/BooleanType.class:180:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/StringType.class:166:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/NumericBooleanType.class:128:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/CustomType.class:543:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/TimeZoneType.class:204:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/DateType.class:343:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/LiteralType.class:18:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/ByteType.class:189:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/LocaleType.class:259:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/CharBooleanType.class:171:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/TimestampType.class:409:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/CurrencyType.class:256:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/AbstractCharArrayType.class:219:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/FloatType.class:177:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/DoubleType.class:173:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/LongType.class:223:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/IntegerType.class:188:objectToSQLString

Found the script below on alvinalexander.com. It is simple but useful for searching through all jar files in the current directory

#!/bin/sh

LOOK_FOR="codehaus/xfire/spring"

for i in `find . -name "*jar"`
do
  echo "Looking in $i ..."
  jar tvf $i | grep $LOOK_FOR > /dev/null
  if [ $? == 0 ]
  then
    echo "==> Found \"$LOOK_FOR\" in $i"
  fi
done

Replace "codehaus..." with your query, i.e. a class name.

Sample output:

$ ./searchjars.sh

Looking in ./activation-1.1.jar ...
Looking in ./commons-beanutils-1.7.0.jar ...
Looking in ./commons-codec-1.3.jar ...
Looking in ./commons-pool.jar ...
Looking in ./jaxen-1.1-beta-9.jar ...
Looking in ./jdom-1.0.jar ...
Looking in ./mail-1.4.jar ...
Looking in ./xbean-2.2.0.jar ...
Looking in ./xbean-spring-2.8.jar ...
Looking in ./xfire-aegis-1.2.6.jar ...
Looking in ./xfire-annotations-1.2.6.jar ...
Looking in ./xfire-core-1.2.6.jar ...
Looking in ./xfire-java5-1.2.6.jar ...
Looking in ./xfire-jaxws-1.2.6.jar ...
Looking in ./xfire-jsr181-api-1.0-M1.jar ...
Looking in ./xfire-spring-1.2.6.jar ...
==> Found "codehaus/xfire/spring" in ./xfire-spring-1.2.6.jar
Looking in ./XmlSchema-1.1.jar ...

The below command shows the results with the file name and jar file name.

1. To find the string in the list of jar file.

    find <%PATH of the Folder where you need to search%> -name "*.jar" -print -exec zipgrep "jar$|<%STRING THAT YOU NEED TO FIND>" '{}' \;
   

2. To find the class name in the list of jar file.

    find . -name "*.jar" -print -exec jar tvf {} \; |grep -E "jar$|<%CLASS NAME THAT YOU NEED TO FIND>\.class"
   

Using jfind jar

> JFind can find a Java class file anywhere on the filesystem, even if > it is hidden many levels deep in a jar within an ear within a zip!

http://jfind.sourceforge.net/

Although there are ways of doing it using a decomplier or eclipse , but it gets tricky when those jars are not part of your project , or its particularly painful when using decompiler and you have 100s or 1000s of jars placed in several folders.

I found this CMD command useful , which helps in finding the class names in list of jars present in directory .

forfiles /S /M *.jar /C "cmd /c jar -tvf @file | findstr "classname" && echo @path

You can either navigate to your desired path , and open cmd from there and run this command OR give the path directly in command itself , like this

forfiles /S /M *.jar /C "cmd /c jar -tvf @file | findstr /C:"classname" && echo @path

My use case was to find a particular class in Glassfish , so command will look something like this :