Estimate the size of the extracted files before extraction a `tar.gz` archive?

Question

Before using tar to extract a .tar.gz archive, it is possible to get an estimate of how large the extracted files are in total?

Solution

For gzip:

$ gzip -l binutils-2.24.tar.gz
         compressed        uncompressed  ratio uncompressed_name
           30809913           186997248  83.5% binutils-2.24.tar

Now you see a compressed and an uncompressed size of the content.

Or alternatively use that command:

$ zcat binutils-2.24.tar.gz | wc --bytes
186997248

For bzip2, there is bzcat:

$ bzcat binutils-2.24.tar.bz2 | wc -c
186997248

For rar, use:

$ unrar l archive.rar
...
    1        465769002 102749558  22%

In the last line of the output there is the original size in bytes (the second digit).

For zip, use

$ unzip -l archive.zip
...
700136                     4 files

Also the last line (the first digit)

Comments

[Admin]

Try gzip -l archive.tar.gz

[Tim]

Thanks. WHat if it is other common types' compression files, e.g. .bz, .rar, .zip, ...?

[PM 2Ring]

Note that the methods which use -l or l are much more efficient than the *cat methods. The former methods simply read the file size data from the archive header, the later methods extract the entire archive contents.