If you have Midnight Commander (mc) installed, you can see the contents of a tar.gz file natively. If you need to read a specific file, mc does a temporary extract of the same and displays it for you.
If you have kde installed, kfm does the same. USM Bish On Mon, Sep 04, 2000 at 11:18:37PM -0700, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > |> Is there a way to search the contents of a tar.gz file withouth > |> having to extract everything. Specifically, I want to determine > |> the disc-id of an audio CD, so I downloaded the freedb database in > |> tar.gz format. Of course, it's a very large file. I would like to > |> grep the contents to find the CD that I'm looking for, but I don't > |> want to extract everything. I thought there would be a series of > |> piped commands that would allow me to do it, but I can't figure it > |> out. > > If you use emacs, you can just visit the compressed tar file and > operate on it like any directory-tree. For example, put FOO.tar.gz in > some directory DIR. Ctl-x d DIR to run dired (the directory editor) on > DIR, move the cursor to FOO.tar.gz and type f. The contents of the > tarball will be displayed in the dired buffer and you can operate on > the files as if they had been uncompressed and extracted from the > archive, even though they haven't. > > Jim >
