Performing grep operation in tar files without extracting

Question

I have list of files which contain particular patterns, but those files have been tarred. Now I want to search for the pattern in the tar file, and to know which files conta

Answer 1

That's actually very easy with ugrep option -z:

-z, --decompress
        Decompress files to search, when compressed.  Archives (.cpio,
        .pax, .tar, and .zip) and compressed archives (e.g. .taz, .tgz,
        .tpz, .tbz, .tbz2, .tb2, .tz2, .tlz, and .txz) are searched and
        matching pathnames of files in archives are output in braces.  If
        -g, -O, -M, or -t is specified, searches files within archives
        whose name matches globs, matches file name extensions, matches
        file signature magic bytes, or matches file types, respectively.
        Supported compression formats: gzip (.gz), compress (.Z), zip,
        bzip2 (requires suffix .bz, .bz2, .bzip2, .tbz, .tbz2, .tb2, .tz2),
        lzma and xz (requires suffix .lzma, .tlz, .xz, .txz).

For example:

ugrep -z PATTERN archive.tgz

This greps each of the archived files to display PATTERN matches with the archived filenames. Archived filenames are shown in braces to distinguish them from ordinary filenames. Everything else is the same as grep (ugrep has the same options and produces the same output). For example:

$ ugrep -z "Hello" archive.tgz
{Hello.bat}:echo "Hello World!"
Binary file archive.tgz{Hello.class} matches
{Hello.java}:public class Hello // prints a Hello World! greeting
{Hello.java}:  { System.out.println("Hello World!");
{Hello.pdf}:(Hello)
{Hello.sh}:echo "Hello World!"
{Hello.txt}:Hello

If you just want the file names, use option -l (--files-with-matches) and customize the filename output with option --format="%z%~" to get rid of the braces:

$ ugrep -z Hello -l --format="%z%~" archive.tgz
Hello.bat
Hello.class
Hello.java
Hello.pdf
Hello.sh
Hello.txt

Tarballs (.tar.gz/.tgz, .tar.bz2/.tbz, .tar.xz/.txz, .tar.lzma/.tlz) are searched as well as .zip archives.