linux - How to grep for a pattern in the files in tar archive without filling up disk space

Question

I have a tar archive which is very big ~ 5GB.

I want to grep for a pattern on all files (and also print the name of the file that has the pattern ) in the archive but do not want to fill up my disk space by extracting the archive.

Anyway I can do that?

I tried these, but this does not give me the file names that contain the pattern, just the matching lines:

tar -O -xf test.tar.gz | grep 'this'
tar -xf test.tar.gz --to-command='grep awesome'

Also where is this feature of tar documented? tar xf test.tar $FILE

Answer 1

Seems like nobody posted this simple solution that processes the archive only once:

tar xzf archive.tgz --to-command 
    'grep --label="$TAR_FILENAME" -H PATTERN ; true'

Here tar passes the name of each file in a variable (see the docs) and it is used by grep to print it with each match. Also true is added so that tar doesn't complain about failing to extract files that don't match.