Check the total content size of a tar gz file

gzip, tar

Solution

This will sum the total content size of the extracted files:

$ tar tzvf archive.tar.gz | sed 's/ \+/ /g' | cut -f3 -d' ' | sed '2,$s/^/+ /' | paste -sd' ' | bc

The output is given in bytes.

Explanation: `tar tzvf` lists the files in the archive in verbose format like `ls -l`. `sed` and `cut` isolate the file size field. The second `sed` puts a + in front of every size except the first and `paste` concatenates them, giving a sum expression that is then evaluated by `bc`.

Note that this doesn't include metadata, so the disk space taken up by the files when you extract them is going to be larger - potentially many times larger if you have a lot of very small files.

Problem

Original source