How do I list contents of a tar file without extracting it in python? [duplicate]

Question

This question already has answers here:

reading tar file contents without untarring it, in python script (4 answers)

Closed 2 years ago.

I've got a huge *.tar.gz file and I want to see the list of files contained in it without extracting the contents (preferably with mtimes per file). How can I achieve that in python?

Answer 1

You can use TarFile.getnames() like this:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import tarfile
tarf = tarfile.open('foo.tar.gz', 'r:gz')
print(tarf.getnames())

http://docs.python.org/3.3/library/tarfile.html#tarfile.TarFile.getnames

And if you want mtime values you can use getmembers().

print([(member.name, member.mtime) for member in tarf.getmembers()])