List Files in a Jar File

Have you ever wanted a list of the files inside a jar file? It's pretty simple to do using the jar command that ships with java:

jar -tf somefile.jar

That's a great way to get a list of the class names and package names contained within a jar file.

You could also use this technique to list the contents of a zip file, since jar files are actually zip files. For example:

jar -tf some.zip

jar -tf Explained

In the example above we are passing the flag -tf to the jar command. The t in that jar command indicates that we want a table listing of the contents of the jar file. The f flag indicates that we will be passing the file name as the next argument.

You may find that the dash is not even necessary anymore, you can also try listing the file names in jar file like this:

jar tf file.jar

This is a handy one to commit to memory as a Java Developer.