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

I propose gtarsum, that I have written in Go, which means it will be an autonomous executable (no Python or other execution environment needed).

go get github.com/VonC/gtarsum

It will read a tar file, and:

• sort the list of files alphabetically,
• compute a SHA256 for each file content,
• concatenate those hashes into one giant string
• compute the SHA256 of that string

The result is a "global hash" for a tar file, based on the list of files and their content.

It can compare multiple tar files, and return 0 if they are identical, 1 if they are not.