Listing the content of a tar file or a directory only down to some level

Question

I wonder how to list the content of a tar file only down to some level?

I understand tar tvf mytar.tar will list all files, but sometimes I would like

Answer 1

I agree with leonbloy's answer - there's no way to do this straightforwardly within the tarball itself.

Regarding the second part of your question, ls does not have a max depth option. You can recurse everything with ls -R, but that's often not very useful.

However you can do this with both find and tree. For example to list files and directories one level deep, you can do

find -maxdepth 2

or

tree -L 2

tree also has a -d option, which recursively lists directories, but not files, which I find much more useful than -L, in general.