Viewing the Contents of aJAR File

The basic format of the command for viewing the contents of a JAR file is:

jar tf jar-file    

• The t option indicates that you want to view the table of contents of the JAR file.
• The f option indicates that the JAR file whose contents are to be viewed is specified on the command line.
  
• Without the f option, the Jar tool expects a filename on stdin.
• The jar-file argument is the filename (or path and filename) of the JAR file whose contents you want to view.

The t and f options can appear in either order, but there must not be any space between them.

Add the verbose option, v, to add file sizes and last-modified dates to the output.

Example

Use the Jar tool to list the contents of the TicTacToe.jar file created in the previous section:

jar tf TicTacToe.jar

This command displays the contents of the JAR file to stdout:

META-INF/MANIFEST.MF
TicTacToe.class
audio/
audio/beep.au
audio/ding.au
audio/return.au
audio/yahoo1.au
audio/yahoo2.au
images/
images/cross.gif
images/not.gif

• The JAR file contains the TicTacToe class file and the audio and images directory, as expected.
  
• The output also shows that JAR file contains a manifest file, META-INF/MANIFEST.MF, which was automatically placed in the archive by the JAR tool.

• All pathnames are displayed with forward slashes, regardless of the platform or operating system you're using.
  
• Paths in JAR files are always relative; you never see a path beginning with C:, for example.

The JAR tool displays additional information if you use the v option:

jar tvf TicTacToe.jar

The verbose output for the TicTacToe JAR file would look similar to this:

 256 Mon Apr 20 10:50:28 PDT 1998 META-INF/MANIFEST.MF
3885 Mon Apr 20 10:49:50 PDT 1998 TicTacToe.class
   0 Wed Apr 15 16:39:32 PDT 1998 audio/
4032 Wed Apr 15 16:39:32 PDT 1998 audio/beep.au
2566 Wed Apr 15 16:39:32 PDT 1998 audio/ding.au
6558 Wed Apr 15 16:39:32 PDT 1998 audio/return.au
7834 Wed Apr 15 16:39:32 PDT 1998 audio/yahoo1.au
7463 Wed Apr 15 16:39:32 PDT 1998 audio/yahoo2.au
   0 Wed Apr 15 16:39:44 PDT 1998 images/
 157 Wed Apr 15 16:39:44 PDT 1998 images/cross.gif
 158 Wed Apr 15 16:39:44 PDT 1998 images/not.gif