No. of files in Tar

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi Frields,
I would like to know the number of files present in a tar without using the command tar -tvf |wc -l

Is their any command for this?

2

There is no command other than the tar t.
tar is short for tape archive - it was developed for sequential access in a tape drive. So there is no metadata like you have for a direct access filesystem.

3

Hi,

Please can you explain why you do not want to use this command.

Cheers,
Shazin

4

Hi,

Please can you explain why you do not want to use this command.

Cheers,
Shazin

5

Hi ,

I am looking for an alternative because, their are some thousand files present in the tar and I feel the tar -tvf command is scanning file by file which takes more time.

I am looking for an option, which will give the output much faster.

6

If you are not in control of creating the "tar" files then the only option is the "t" (or "-t" on some versions) switch as advised by "jim mcnamara".

Have you considered a script to index the "tar" archives and store that index alongside each "tar" file such that you only need to produce the files list once per archive?

In a similar situation I used multiple concurrent jobs in a quiet slot each night to index archive "tar" files in preparation for selective re-archiving without duplicate identical files.

7

this probably isn't the answer you were looking for, but opening with WinZip or WinRar will give you the number of files present in the archive (but even those provide a table of contents so i'm not sure this would be quicker than 'tar t').

8

Leppie is hinting that there are more modern ways of creating an archive file which have a directory at the front of the archive.