targrep

Grepping within recursive tarballs

Goal

This utility function searches for a given pattern within recursive tarballs Within a single tarball, this can be achieved using zgrep -a pattern archive.tar, for instance. However, when a tarball may contain other tarballs, it can be more tricky to obtain

Sample use case

Input

• parent.tar
  • child1.tar
    • subchild1-1.tar
      • path/to/file1.text
      • ...
    • subchild1-2.tar
    • ...
  • child2.tar
    • subchild2-1.tar
      • path/to/otherfile.text
      • ...
  • folder/otherfile.log

Usage

If searching for the string "ERROR" within any file contained in any of the tarballs, you would:

1. Import the function: source targrep.sh
2. Call the function: targrep "ERROR" parent.tar

Credits

Inspired by the code shared on stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/a/13042529/3690491