I wonder how to list the content of a tar file only down to some level?
I understand tar tvf mytar.tar will list all files, but sometimes I would like to only see directories down to some level.
Similarly, for the command ls, how do I control the level of subdirectories that will be displayed? By default, it will only show the direct subdirectories, but not go further.
depth=1
tar --exclude="*/*" -tf file.tar
depth=2
tar --exclude="*/*/*" -tf file.tar
It would be nice if we could tell the find command to look inside a tar file, but I doubt that is possible.
I quick and ugly (and not foolproof) way would be to limit the number of directory separators, for example:
$ tar tvf myfile.tar | grep -E '^[^/]*(/[^/]*){1,2}$'
The 2 tells to display not more than 2 slashes (in my case one is already generated by the user/group separator), and hence, to display files at depth at most one. You might want to try with different numbers in place of the 2.