The problem

My Macbook Pro has a fairly small hardrive, so I try to compress files that I do not need on an everyday basis. Mac OS X tends to decompress any archive file that you click on and I needed to check the content of an archive that resided on Dropbox.

The solution

The archive I was looking at was a tar.gz archive. It turns out tar does this very well, which I found out through this blog :

1

tar -tf nameofthearchive.tar.gz

or without the dash (BSD-style options) :

1

tar tf nameofthearchive.tar.gz

If the archive is a zipfile, one can use the zipinfo command :

1

zipinfo nameofthearchive.zip

or unzip -l :

1

unzip -l nameofthearchive.zip

Here We go !

I figured that since I am soon to be on the job market, it might be good to have a little more active presence online. Plus it would be great to have a way to aggregate some of the things I have been rambling about and to force me to formalize some of the experiments I have running. Let us hope it fares better than the old blog…