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Is it possible to use the find command so that it searches the files within a tar.gz archive also using wildcards?

like

find archive.tar.gz --name *foo*
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2 Answers

up vote 7 down vote accepted

How about just:

$ tar tf archive.tar.gz | grep foo
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doesnt that just list all the files? – clamp Mar 12 '12 at 13:06
@clamp Yes, if you want to do something to each file, simply pipe that output to another command. – htor Mar 12 '12 at 13:07
thanks! sorry but im a newbie in unix. i tried: tar tf graphics.tar.gz | find . --name *space* but it says unkown predicate --name – clamp Mar 12 '12 at 13:17
@clamp find arguments only take one dash, but because it's a list of files on stdin, you want to use grep instead, like hesse's example code. Try tar tf graphics.tar.gz | grep 'space' – Kevin Mar 12 '12 at 13:24
1  
grep *foo* isn't a valid regular expression. greg doesn't understand globs, it understands regular expressions. Try grep foo instead. – Alexios Mar 12 '12 at 14:19
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up vote 1 down vote

Mount the archive as a directory. You can do it with the AVFS filesystem, which allows you to access any archive as a directory whose name has a trailing #.

mountavfs
cd ~/.avfs$PWD
find archive.tar.gz\# -name '*foo*'
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