List contents of multiple jar files

Question

I am searching for a .class file inside a bunch of jars.

jar tf abc.jar 

works for one file. I tried

find -name \"*.jar\" | xa         


        

Answer 1

You need to pass -n 1 to xargs to force it to run a separate jar command for each filename that it gets from find:

find -name "*.jar" | xargs -n 1 jar tf

Otherwise xargs's command line looks like jar tf file1.jar file2.jar..., which has a different meaning to what is intended.

A useful debugging technique is to stick echo before the command to be run by xargs:

find -name "*.jar" | xargs echo jar tf

This would print out the full jar command instead of executing it, so that you can see what's wrong with it.