unix - Performing grep operation in tar files without extracting

Question

I have list of files which contain particular patterns, but those files have been tarred. Now I want to search for the pattern in the tar file, and to know which files contain the pattern without extracting the files.

Any idea...?

Answer 1

the tar command has a -O switch to extract your files to standard output. So you can pipe those output to grep/awk

tar xvf  test.tar -O | awk '/pattern/{print}'

tar xvf  test.tar -O | grep "pattern"

eg to return file name one pattern found

tar tf myarchive.tar | while read -r FILE
do
    if tar xf test.tar $FILE  -O | grep "pattern" ;then
        echo "found pattern in : $FILE"
    fi
done