Viewing archive contents

You may want to see the contents of an archive. To do that, you can use the -t option along with the -f option followed by the archive you wish to view:

tar -tf archive

For example, to view the contents of the archive scripts.tar that we just created, you can run the command:

root@ubuntu-linux:/home/elliot# tar -tf /root/backup/scripts.tar 
3x10.sh
detect.sh 
empty.sh 
filetype.sh 
fun1.sh 
game.sh 
hello20.sh 
hello2.sh 
hello3.sh 
hello.sh 
math.sh 
mydate.sh 
noweb.sh 
numbers.sh 
rename.sh 
size2.sh 
size3.sh 
size.sh

As you can see, it listed all the files in the scripts.tar archive.