[SOLVED] List all files in a .tar.bz2, sorted by size

List all files in a .tar.bz2, sorted by size

I use this command to list all files in an archive:

tar jtvf blah.tar.bz2

How to list them sorted by size? Or list only the biggest files (i.e. files bigger than, say, 10MB)?

Solution

list files, filter by size, print only size+space+path, and sort by size only, descending order:

On every machine I tested (back in 2016 when this answer was written: don't know... similar things but older, plus FreeBSD 8 probably; today: Artixlinux, Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 22.04, CentOS 7, Devuan 3, Devuan 4), the output has 5 columns total, and 3rd is size, 5th is filename):

size=10485760
tar tvf blah.tar.bz2 \
    | awk -v size="$size" '$3 >= size {print $3" "$5}' \
    | sort -t' ' -k1,1nr

If you have whatever undefined OS one editor of this answer has, maybe you have the data in fields 5 and 9 instead, and then use:

size=10485760
tar tvf blah.tar.bz2 \
    | awk -v size="$size" '$5 >= size {print $5" "$9}' \
    | sort -t' ' -k1,1nr