Search for a file inside all of tar.gz

Question

i have a lot's of tar.gz files in random place and i want to look for a file inside all of tar.gz file

for example :

/root/a.tar.gz
/home/backup-2016.tar.gz
/home2/user/files/2015/abc.tar.gz

i am looking for file or folder inside of them

Answer 1

You can use this (rather long) one-liner, replacing PATTERN with your search pattern (case insensitive unless you remove the -i option after grep):

find / -iname "*.tar.gz" -exec bash -c 'result=$(set -o pipefail ; echo "{}" ; tar -tf {} | grep -i "PATTERN" | sed "s/^/    /") ; test $? -eq 0 && printf "$result\n"' \;

If you don't want to search your whole computer but just a specific directory (recursively), you may specify that as first argument after find instead of the /. The .tar.gz suffix for archives to process is case insensitive as well unless you replace the -iname after find with name.

The output might look somehow like this (searching in /usr/share/doc for the pattern default):

/usr/share/doc/openjdk-8-jre-headless/test-amd64/failed_tests-hotspot.tar.gz
    test/langtools/JTwork/tools/javac/lambda/methodReferenceExecution/MethodReferenceTestInnerDefault.jtr
    test/langtools/JTwork/tools/javac/lambda/methodReferenceExecution/MethodReferenceTestSuperDefault.jtr
    test/langtools/JTwork/tools/javac/lambda/methodReferenceExecution/MethodReferenceTestVarArgsSuperDefault.jtr
    test/langtools/JTwork/tools/javac/lambdaShapes/org/openjdk/tests/vm/DefaultMethodsTest.jtr
/usr/share/doc/apg/php.tar.gz
    ./themes/default.php

You see the archive path in one line followed by all content entries matching the pattern, each in a separate line indented by 4 spaces.

---

This can be also put in a script (e.g. archive-search, don't forget to make it executable with chmod +x FILENAME):

#!/bin/bash
# Usage:   archive-search PATTERN DIRECTORY

find "$2" -iname "*.tar.gz" -exec bash -c '
        result=$(
                set -o pipefail
                echo "{}"
                tar -tf {} | grep -i "$0" | sed "s/^/    /"
        )
        test $? -eq 0 && printf "$result\n"
' "$1" \;

or in a Bash function (e.g. archive-search, append to your ~/.bashrc if you want to have it available in every new Bash session):

archive-search () {
    # Usage:   archive-search PATTERN DIRECTORY

    find "$2" -iname "*.tar.gz" -exec bash -c '
            result=$(
                    set -o pipefail
                    echo "{}"
                    tar -tf {} | grep -i "$0" | sed "s/^/    /"
            )
            test $? -eq 0 && printf "$result\n"
    ' "$1" \;
}

Both the script and the function take search pattern and directory as command-line arguments, like this:

archive-search "default" /usr/share/doc

Answer 2

With zfind you can do:

zfind 'name like "file%" and archive'

to search for a file named file* inside any archive (tar/zip/7z/rar).