Let's say you have a tar archive named example.tar.

example.tar

The tar command with the -t or --list and -f or --file optiions can be used to view the contents of the tar achive. In this example, the tar archive contains two files, foo.txt and bar.txt.

tar -tf example.tar

tmp/sample
tmp/sample/foo.txt
tmp/sample/bar.txt

The -v or --verbose option can be used to include the file attributes.

tar -tvf example.tar

drwxr-x--- root root 4096 2011-08-24 21:38 tmp/sample
-rw-rw-r-- root root 2699 2011-08-24 21:39 tmp/sample/foo.txt
-rw-rw-r-- root root 1784 2012-01-12 05:21 tmp/sample/bar.txt

Search for a specific file

An individual file can be included on the command line. If the tar archive contains the file, the following will be displayed.

tar -tf example.tar tmp/sample/foo.txt

tmp/sample/foo.txt

If the tar archive does not contain the file, the following will be displayed.

tar -tf example.tar tmp/sample/bogus.txt

tar: tmp/sample/bogus.txt: Not found in archive

Compression

If the tar archive is gzip compressed, the -z option must be included.

tar -ztf example.tar.gz

If the tar archive is bzip2 compressed, the -j option must be included.

tar -jtf example.tar.bz2

Or, pigz could be used.

tar --use-compress-program=pigz -tf example.tar.pigz