Listing the Contents of a Stored Directory

To get information about the contents of an archived directory, use the directory name as a file name argument in conjunction with ‘--list’ (‘-t’). To find out file attributes, include the ‘--verbose’ (‘-v’) option.

For example, to find out about files in the directory ‘practice’, in the archive file ‘music.tar’, type:

$ tar --list --verbose --file=music.tar practice

tar responds:

drwxrwxrwx myself user 0 1990-05-31 21:49 practice/
-rw-r--r-- myself user 42 1990-05-21 13:29 practice/blues
-rw-r--r-- myself user 62 1990-05-23 10:55 practice/folk
-rw-r--r-- myself user 40 1990-05-21 13:30 practice/jazz
-rw-r--r-- myself user 10240 1990-05-31 21:49 practice/collection.tar

When you use a directory name as a file name argument, tar acts on all the files (including sub-directories) in that directory.