How to check if a Unix .tar.gz file is a valid file without uncompressing?

Question

I have found the question How to determine if data is valid tar file without a file?, but I was wondering: is there a ready made command line solution?

Answer 1

If you want to do a real test extract of a tar file without extracting to disk, use the -O option. This spews the extract to standard output instead of the filesystem. If the tar file is corrupt, the process will abort with an error.

Example of failed tar ball test...

$ echo "this will not pass the test" > hello.tgz
$ tar -xvzf hello.tgz -O > /dev/null
gzip: stdin: not in gzip format
tar: Child returned status 1
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors
$ rm hello.*

Working Example...

$ ls hello*
ls: hello*: No such file or directory
$ echo "hello1" > hello1.txt
$ echo "hello2" > hello2.txt
$ tar -cvzf hello.tgz hello[12].txt
hello1.txt
hello2.txt
$ rm hello[12].txt
$ ls hello*
hello.tgz
$ tar -xvzf hello.tgz -O
hello1.txt
hello1
hello2.txt
hello2
$ ls hello*
hello.tgz
$ tar -xvzf hello.tgz
hello1.txt
hello2.txt
$ ls hello*
hello1.txt  hello2.txt  hello.tgz
$ rm hello*