Listing the content of a tar file or a directory only down to some level

Bash Problem Overview

I wonder how to list the content of a tar file only down to some level?

I understand tar tvf mytar.tar will list all files, but sometimes I would like to only see directories down to some level.

Similarly, for the command ls, how do I control the level of subdirectories that will be displayed? By default, it will only show the direct subdirectories, but not go further.

Bash Solutions

Solution 1 - Bash

depth=1

tar --exclude="*/*" -tf file.tar

depth=2

tar --exclude="*/*/*" -tf file.tar

Solution 2 - Bash

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.

You could probably pipe the output of ls -R to this awk script, and have the same effect.

Solution 3 - Bash

Another option is archivemount. You mount it, and cd into it. Then you can do anything with it just as with other filesystem.

$ archivemount /path/to/files.tgz /path/to/mnt/folder

It seems faster than the tar method.

Solution 4 - Bash

It would be nice if we could tell the find command to look inside a tar file, but I doubt that is possible.

I quick and ugly (and not foolproof) way would be to limit the number of directory separators, for example:

 $ tar tvf myfile.tar | grep -E '^[^/]*(/[^/]*){1,2}$'

The 2 tells to display not more than 2 slashes (in my case one is already generated by the user/group separator), and hence, to display files at depth at most one. You might want to try with different numbers in place of the 2.

Solution 5 - Bash

I agree with leonbloy's answer - there's no way to do this straightforwardly within the tarball itself.

Regarding the second part of your question, ls does not have a max depth option. You can recurse everything with ls -R, but that's often not very useful.

However you can do this with both find and tree. For example to list files and directories one level deep, you can do

find -maxdepth 2

tree -L 2

tree also has a -d option, which recursively lists directories, but not files, which I find much more useful than -L, in general.

Solution 6 - Bash

I was able to show only the directory names at a particular depth using grep:

for depth 3:

tar -tf mytar.tar | grep -Ex '([^/]+/){3}'

or for depth $DEPTH:

tar -tf mytar.tar | grep -Ex '([^/]+){$DEPTH}/'

You can speed that up by combining grep with --exclude from @sacapeao's accepted answer.

for depth 3:

tar --exclude '*/*/*/*/*' -tf mytar.tar | grep -Ex '([^/]+/){3}'

Content Type	Original Author	Original Content on Stackoverflow
Question	Tim	View Question on Stackoverflow
Solution 1 - Bash	sacapeao	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 2 - Bash	Glen Solsberry	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 3 - Bash	Sisyphus	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 4 - Bash	leonbloy	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 5 - Bash	ire_and_curses	View Answer on Stackoverflow
Solution 6 - Bash	hobs	View Answer on Stackoverflow