Find recursively all archive files of diverse archive formats and search them for file name patterns

Question

At best I would like to have a call like this:

$searchtool /path/to/search/ -contained-file-name "*vacation*jpg"

... so that this tool

• does a recursive scan of the given path
• takes all files with supported archive formats which should at least be the "most common" like zip, rar, 7z, tar.bz, tar.gz ...
• and scan the file list of the archive for the name pattern in question (here *vacation*jpg)

I'm aware of how to use the find tool, tar, unzip and alike. I could combine these with a shell script but I'm looking for a simple solution that might be a shell one-liner or a dedicated tool (hints to GUI tools are welcome but my solution must be command line based).

Answer 1

(Adapted from How do I recursively grep through compressed archives?)

Install AVFS, a filesystem that provides transparent access inside archives. First run this command once to set up a view of your machine's filesystem in which you can access archives as if they were directories:

mountavfs

After this, if /path/to/archive.zip is a recognized archive, then ~/.avfs/path/to/archive.zip# is a directory that appears to contain the contents of the archive.

find ~/.avfs"$PWD" \( -name '*.7z' -o -name '*.zip' -o -name '*.tar.gz' -o -name '*.tgz' \) \
     -exec sh -c '
                  find "$0#" -name "*vacation*.jpg"
                 ' {} 'Test::Version' \;

Explanations:

• Mount the AVFS filesystem.
• Look for archive files in ~/.avfs$PWD, which is the AVFS view of the current directory.
• For each archive, execute the specified shell snippet (with $0 = archive name and $1 = pattern to search).
• $0# is the directory view of the archive $0.
• {\} rather than {} is needed in case the outer find substitutes {} inside -exec ; arguments (some do it, some don't).

Or in zsh ≥4.3:

mountavfs
ls -l ~/.avfs$PWD/**/*.(7z|tgz|tar.gz|zip)(e\''
     reply=($REPLY\#/**/*vacation*.jpg(.N))
'\')

Explanations:

• ~/.avfs$PWD/**/*.(7z|tgz|tar.gz|zip) matches archives in the AVFS view of the current directory and its subdirectories.
• PATTERN(e\''CODE'\') applies CODE to each match of PATTERN. The name of the matched file is in $REPLY. Setting the reply array turns the match into a list of names.
• $REPLY\# is the directory view of the archive.
• $REPLY\#/**/*vacation*.jpg matches *vacation*.jpg files in the archive.
• The N glob qualifier makes the pattern expand to an empty list if there is no match.