beer planet

This may not be very obvious but this is the command line to list files within a tar.gz archive on the fly:

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tar -tzf file.tar.gz

-t: lists files
-f: instructs tar to deal with the following filename (file.tar.gz)
-z: informs tar that the it's dealing with a gzip file (-j if it's bzip2)

Updated: May 1st, 2008

Sometimes in my line of work, I need to figure out if a url or filename point to a media file by checking for the file extension. If it's a url, however, it may be followed by various parameters. Not to overcomplicate things, I came up with the following Perl code:

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#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my $name = "some_file.flv"; # or http://example.com/file.mp4?foo=bar
my $is_media_type = ($name =~ /\.(wmv|avi|flv|mov|mkv|mp..?|swf|ra.?|rm|as.|m4[av]|smi.?)\b/i);
if($is_media_type){
  print "media extension found\n";
}
else{
  print "not a media file\n";
}

This gets the job done without triggering any false positives (at least for the files/urls I've been dealing with so far). Am I missing any obvious types? Do you have a better way to accomplish the same thing? If so, please share in the comments.