How to check if a Unix .tar.gz file is a valid fil

Question

I have found the question How to determine if data is valid tar file without a file?, but I was wondering: is there a ready made command line solution?

Answer 1

You can also check contents of *.tag.gz file using pigz (parallel gzip) to speedup the archive check:

pigz -cvdp number_of_threads /[...]path[...]/archive_name.tar.gz | tar -tv > /dev/null

Answer 2

These are all very sub-optimal solutions. From the GZIP spec

ID2 (IDentification 2)
These have the fixed values ID1 = 31 (0x1f, \037), ID2 = 139 (0x8b, \213), to identify the file as being in gzip format.

Has to be coded into whatever language you're using.

Answer 3

> use the -O option. [...] If the tar file is corrupt, the process will abort with an error.

Sometimes yes, but sometimes not. Let's see an example of a corrupted file:

echo Pete > my_name
tar -cf my_data.tar my_name 

# // Simulate a corruption
sed < my_data.tar 's/Pete/Fool/' > my_data_now.tar
# // "my_data_now.tar" is the corrupted file

tar -xvf my_data_now.tar -O

It shows:

my_name
Fool  

Even if you execute

echo $?

tar said that there was no error:

0

but the file was corrupted, it has now "Fool" instead of "Pete".

Answer 4

What about just getting a listing of the tarball and throw away the output, rather than decompressing the file?

tar -tzf my_tar.tar.gz >/dev/null

Edited as per comment. Thanks zrajm!

Edit as per comment. Thanks Frozen Flame! This test in no way implies integrity of the data. Because it was designed as a tape archival utility most implementations of tar will allow multiple copies of the same file!

Answer 5

I have tried the following command and they work well.

bzip2 -t file.bz2
gunzip -t file.gz

However, we can found these two command are time-consuming. Maybe we need some more quick way to determine the intact of the compress files.

Answer 6

A nice option is to use tar -tvvf <filePath> which adds a line that reports the kind of file.

Example in a valid .tar file:

> tar -tvvf filename.tar 
drwxr-xr-x  0 diegoreymendez staff       0 Jul 31 12:46 ./testfolder2/
-rw-r--r--  0 diegoreymendez staff      82 Jul 31 12:46 ./testfolder2/._.DS_Store
-rw-r--r--  0 diegoreymendez staff    6148 Jul 31 12:46 ./testfolder2/.DS_Store
drwxr-xr-x  0 diegoreymendez staff       0 Jul 31 12:42 ./testfolder2/testfolder/
-rw-r--r--  0 diegoreymendez staff      82 Jul 31 12:42 ./testfolder2/testfolder/._.DS_Store
-rw-r--r--  0 diegoreymendez staff    6148 Jul 31 12:42 ./testfolder2/testfolder/.DS_Store
-rw-r--r--  0 diegoreymendez staff  325377 Jul  5 09:50 ./testfolder2/testfolder/Scala.pages
Archive Format: POSIX ustar format,  Compression: none

Corrupted .tar file:

> tar -tvvf corrupted.tar 
tar: Unrecognized archive format
Archive Format: (null),  Compression: none
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors.