Linux Survival Basics

List Contents of a Backup Tarball

You need to see what a backup tarball contains before restoring it.

Command

tar -tf archives/site-backup.tar | sort | head

What changed

Nothing changes. The command lists archive member names.

Danger

safe

When to use it

Use before extracting a backup archive or when checking whether expected files are present.

When not to use it

Do not treat a file listing as content verification; pair it with checksums when possible.

Undo or recovery

No undo needed because this command is read-only.

Expected output

A sorted sample of paths stored inside the tar archive.

demo script

Disposable terminal steps

ls -lh archives/site-backup.tar
tar -tf archives/site-backup.tar | sort | head

Terminal transcript Demo JSON

simulated output

What it looks like

disposable vessel

::fixture-ready::
$ ls -lh archives/site-backup.tar
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 10K Jun 25 13:19 archives/site-backup.tar
::exit-code::0
$ tar -tf archives/site-backup.tar | sort | head
./
./app/
./app/config.yml
./assets/
./assets/logo.svg
./content/
./content/about.md
./content/index.md
::exit-code::0

YouTube Short

Inspect tar before restore.

Use tar -tf to list archive contents before extracting or restoring anything.

experiments

A/B tests to run

Metric: watch_time

A: Do not extract yet.

B: List archive contents first.