How to compare two tarball's content

Question

I want to tell whether two tarball files contain identical files, in terms of file name and file content, not including meta-data like date, user, group.

However, There

Answer 1

If not extracting the archives nor needing the differences, try diff's -q option:

diff -q 1.tar 2.tar

This quiet result will be "1.tar 2.tar differ" or nothing, if no differences.