I have a huge file file.tar.xz containing many smaller text files with a similar structure. I want to quickly examine a file out of the compressed file and have a glimpse of files content structure. I don't have information about names of the files within the compressed file. Is there anyway to extract a single file out given the above the above scenario?
Thank you.
EDIT: I don't want to tar -xvf file.tar.xz.
Based on the discussion in the comments, I tried the following which worked for me. It might not be the most optimal solution, the regex might need some improvement, but you'll get the idea.
I first created a demo archive:
cd /tmp
mkdir demo
for i in {1..100}; do echo $i > "demo/$i.txt"; done
cd demo && tar cfJ ../demo.tar.xz * && cd ..
demo.tar.xz now contains 100 txt files.
The following lists the contents of the archive, selects the first file and stores the path within the archive into the variable firstfile:
firstfile=`tar -tvf demo.tar.xz | grep -Po -m1 "(?<=:[0-9]{2} ).*$"`
echo $firstfile will output 1.txt.
You can now extract this single file from the archive:
tar xf demo.tar.xz $firstfile