Is there a quick way to delete a file from a Jar / war without having to extract the jar and recreate it?

Question

So I need to remove a file from a .jar or .war file. I was hoping there was something like jar -d myjar.jar file_I_donot_need.txt

But, right now the only way I can see of doing this from my Linux command line (without using WinRAR/Winzip or the Linux equivalent) is to

• Do jar -xvf and extract the complete .jar file
• Remove the file(s) I don't need
• Re-jar the .jar file using jar -cvf

Please tell me there is a shorter way.

Answer 1

zip -d file.jar unwanted_file.txt

jar is just a zip file after all. Definitely much faster than uncompressing/recompressing.