viewing contents of tar/tar.gz/tgz files

[John]

Jim Cheetham wrote:
> On Oct 18, 2004, at 8:49 PM, volvoguy wrote:
> 
>> less somefile.tar.gz
>>
>> and have it display the contents of the file.
> 
> 
> Surely some mistake? A tar file is in tar format - less will show you 
> the tar format?
> Are you thinking of "tar ztvf somefile.tar.gz" which will show you the 
> table of contents/file list of a tar file? You would often pipe that 
> through less ...
> 
> $ tar ztvf somefile.tar.gz | less
> 
> -jim
> 
> 

Nope.
less can do all sorts of magic that the U folk might want to implement 
much as Red Hat did years ago.

Automatically recognise and decompress compressed files. Automatically 
recognise tarballs and list their contents.


read up on lessopen.