Mastering Python Scripting for System Administrators

Using a tarfile module to examine the contents of TAR files

In this section, we will learn about how we can examine the contents of a created tar archive without actually extracting that tar file. We will do it using Python's tarfile module.

Create a examine_tar_file_content.py script and write the following content in it:

import tarfiletar_file = tarfile.open("work.tar.gz", "r:gz")print(tar_file.getnames())

Run the script as follows:

$ python3 examine_tar_file_content.pyOutput:['welcome.py', 'hello.py', 'hello.txt', 'sample.txt', 'sample1.txt']

In previous example, we used the tarfile module to examine the contents of the created tar file. We used the getnames() function to read the data.