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I tried using -t like the man says, but it just waits.


$ tar -t archive.tar 
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It is waiting to read stdin, and trying to tell you about/if "archive.tar" in that stream. What you want to do is already answered below. Check one? –  Roboprog Dec 3 '09 at 0:00

2 Answers 2

You can also increase the number of details listed:

$ tar -tvf archive.tar
-rw-r--r--  0 user group       0  3 Dez 00:21 file1.txt
-rw-r--r--  0 user group       0  3 Dez 00:21 file2.txt

While the -x switch is usually used to extract the whole content of an archive, you can also use it to extract a single file or directory:

$ tar -xvf test.tar file1.txt
x file1.txt

Best wishes, Fabian

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up vote 6 down vote accepted

I needed to add the f flag to tell tar I'm specifying the filename, i.e.

$ tar -tf archive.tar
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