List the contents of a tar or tar.gz file

Q. How do I list the contents of a tar or tar.gz file?

A. GNU/tar is an archiving program designed to store and extract files from an archive file known as a tarfile. You can create a tar file or compressed tar file tar. However sometime you need to list the contents of a tar or tar.gz file on screen before extracting the all files.

Task: List the contents of a tar file

Use the following command:
$ tar -tvf file.tar

Task: List the contents of a tar.gz file

Use the following command:
$ tar -ztvf file.tar.gz

Task: List the contents of a tar.bz2 file

Use the following command:
$ tar -jtvf file.tar.bz2

Where,

• t: List the contents of an archive
• v: Verbosely list files processed (display detailed information)
• z: Filter the archive through gzip so that we can open compressed (decompress) .gz tar file
• j: Filter archive through bzip2, use to decompress .bz2 files.
• f filename: Use archive file called filename

To know compression ratio use -l option :
 gzip -l all.gz

To see the .zip file contents : 
zcat myfiles.tar.gz | more

How To Gzip A Folder :

tar -cvzf filename.tar.gz folder

tar -cvjf filename.tar.bz2 folder  # even more compression

tar -zcvf compressFileName.tar.gz folderToCompress

zip -r file.zip folder_to_zip
unzip filenname.zip