Extract top 10 biggest files from tar archive Linux

Question

I want to extract only the top 10 biggest files from a tar archive using Linux terminal. I can insert the path of the files to be extracted, but I want to know if I can do it us

Answer 1

You can use below commands to actually extract only the top 10 biggest files from a tar.

files=$(tar -tvf <tar-name> |sort -n -r |egrep -v "^d"|head | awk '{print $9}')
tar -xvf <tar-name> $files

Let me explain what it's doing exactly :

This command will list archive contents to stdout.

tar -tvf <tar-name>

This will sort the content.

tar -tvf <tar-name> |sort -n -r

This will exlcude the directories if any :

tar -tvf <tar-name> |sort -n -r |egrep -v "^d"

This will print the top 10 files (head by default prints 10):

tar -tvf <tar-name> |sort -n -r |egrep -v "^d"|head

This will fetch only the filenames :

tar -tvf <tar-name> |sort -n -r |egrep -v "^d"|head | awk '{print $9}'

Once we get the filenames, we save it in files variable and then we can use below command to fetch the exact files from the tarball :

tar -xvf <tar-name> $files