LIST FILES WITHIN GZIP

List files within gzip

How to list the files within a compressed gzip file without extracting it and get information like the timestamp and permissions?

To achieve this, we can use a tool called zcat.

Looking to its help session we can see:

zcat --help
Usage: /usr/bin/zcat [OPTION]... [FILE]...
Uncompress FILEs to standard output.

-f, --force       force; read compressed data even from a terminal
-l, --list        list compressed file contents
-q, --quiet       suppress all warnings
-r, --recursive   operate recursively on directories
-S, --suffix=SUF  use suffix SUF on compressed files
--synchronous     synchronous output (safer if system crashes, but slower)
-t, --test        test compressed file integrity
-v, --verbose     verbose mode
--help            display this help and exit
--version         display version information and exit

With no FILE, or when FILE is -, read standard input.

Report bugs to <bug-gzip@gnu.org>.

Understanding the option -l

The option we need is -l to list compressed file contents.

This will output a list of all the files and directories in the compressed file, along with some information.

For example, if you have a compressed file called file_sample.gz, you can run the following command to list its contents:

zcat -l file_sample.gz

This will output something like the following:

-rw-r--r-- 1 user group 1024 2023-09-19 17:38:25 file_sample_01.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 user group 1024 2023-10-25 18:40:25 file_sample_02.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 user group 1024 2022-04-11 17:38:25 file_sample_03.txt

This tells us that the compressed file contains several files, and list information like file permission, file ownership, size and timestamp.

Conclusion

zcat is very useful for several situations. This short article is a small introduction, always check the package man pages or the online documentation for more broad knowledge.