How to search for a string in JAR files

Question

My application is built on Java EE.

I have approximately 50 jars in this application.

Is it possible to search for a particular keyword (actually I want to s

Answer 1

One-liner solution that prints file names for which the search string is found, it doesn't jam your console with unnecessary "searching in" logs::

find libdir -wholename "*.jar" | xargs --replace={} bash -c 'zipgrep "BEGIN REQUEST" {} &>/dev/null; [ $? -eq 0 ] && echo "{}";'

Edit:: Removing unnecessary if statement, and using -name instead of -wholename (actually, I used wholename, but it depends on your scenario and preferences)::

find libdir -name "*.jar" | xargs --replace={} bash -c 'zipgrep "BEGIN REQUEST" {} &>/dev/null && echo "{}";'

You can also use sh instead of bash. One last thing, --replace={} is just equivalent to -I{} (I usually use long option formats, to avoid having to go into the manual again later).

Answer 2

Found the script below on alvinalexander.com. It is simple but useful for searching through all jar files in the current directory

#!/bin/sh

LOOK_FOR="codehaus/xfire/spring"

for i in `find . -name "*jar"`
do
  echo "Looking in $i ..."
  jar tvf $i | grep $LOOK_FOR > /dev/null
  if [ $? == 0 ]
  then
    echo "==> Found \"$LOOK_FOR\" in $i"
  fi
done

Replace "codehaus..." with your query, i.e. a class name.

Sample output:

$ ./searchjars.sh

Looking in ./activation-1.1.jar ...
Looking in ./commons-beanutils-1.7.0.jar ...
Looking in ./commons-codec-1.3.jar ...
Looking in ./commons-pool.jar ...
Looking in ./jaxen-1.1-beta-9.jar ...
Looking in ./jdom-1.0.jar ...
Looking in ./mail-1.4.jar ...
Looking in ./xbean-2.2.0.jar ...
Looking in ./xbean-spring-2.8.jar ...
Looking in ./xfire-aegis-1.2.6.jar ...
Looking in ./xfire-annotations-1.2.6.jar ...
Looking in ./xfire-core-1.2.6.jar ...
Looking in ./xfire-java5-1.2.6.jar ...
Looking in ./xfire-jaxws-1.2.6.jar ...
Looking in ./xfire-jsr181-api-1.0-M1.jar ...
Looking in ./xfire-spring-1.2.6.jar ...
==> Found "codehaus/xfire/spring" in ./xfire-spring-1.2.6.jar
Looking in ./XmlSchema-1.1.jar ...

Answer 3

You can use zipgrep on Linux or OSX:

zipgrep "BEGIN REQUEST" file.jar

If you wish to search a number of jars, do

find libdir -name "*.jar" -exec zipgrep "BEGIN REQUEST" '{}' \;

where libdir is a directory containing all jars. The command will recursively search subdirectories too.

For windows, you can download cygwin and install zipgrep under it: http://www.cygwin.com/

Edit 1

To view the name of the file that the expression was found you could do,

find libdir -name "*.jar" | xargs -I{} sh -c 'echo searching in "{}"; zipgrep "BEGIN REQUEST" {}'

Answer 4

Although there are ways of doing it using a decomplier or eclipse , but it gets tricky when those jars are not part of your project , or its particularly painful when using decompiler and you have 100s or 1000s of jars placed in several folders.

I found this CMD command useful , which helps in finding the class names in list of jars present in directory .

forfiles /S /M *.jar /C "cmd /c jar -tvf @file | findstr "classname" && echo @path

You can either navigate to your desired path , and open cmd from there and run this command OR give the path directly in command itself , like this

forfiles /S /M *.jar /C "cmd /c jar -tvf @file | findstr /C:"classname" && echo @path

My use case was to find a particular class in Glassfish , so command will look something like this :

Answer 5

Using jfind jar

JFind can find a Java class file anywhere on the filesystem, even if it is hidden many levels deep in a jar within an ear within a zip!

http://jfind.sourceforge.net/

Answer 6

Fastjar - very old, but fit your needs. Fastjar contains tool called jargrep (or grepjar). Used the same way as grep:

>  locate .jar | grep hibernate | xargs grepjar -n 'objectToSQLString'

org/hibernate/type/EnumType.class:646:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/sql/Update.class:576:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/sql/Insert.class:410:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/usertype/EnhancedUserType.class:22:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/persister/entity/SingleTableEntityPersister.class:2713:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/hql/classic/WhereParser.class:1910:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/hql/ast/tree/JavaConstantNode.class:344:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/hql/ast/tree/BooleanLiteralNode.class:240:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/hql/ast/util/LiteralProcessor.class:1363:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/BigIntegerType.class:114:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/ShortType.class:189:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/TimeType.class:307:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/CharacterType.class:210:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/BooleanType.class:180:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/StringType.class:166:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/NumericBooleanType.class:128:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/CustomType.class:543:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/TimeZoneType.class:204:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/DateType.class:343:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/LiteralType.class:18:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/ByteType.class:189:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/LocaleType.class:259:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/CharBooleanType.class:171:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/TimestampType.class:409:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/CurrencyType.class:256:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/AbstractCharArrayType.class:219:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/FloatType.class:177:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/DoubleType.class:173:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/LongType.class:223:objectToSQLString
org/hibernate/type/IntegerType.class:188:objectToSQLString