Listing the content of a tar file or a directory only down to some level

I wonder how to list the content of a tar file only down to some level?

I understand tar tvf mytar.tar will list all files, but sometimes I would like to only see directories down to some level.

Similarly, for the command ls, how do I control the level of subdirectories that will be displayed? By default, it will only show the direct subdirectories, but not go further.

depth=1

tar --exclude="*/*" -tf file.tar

depth=2

tar --exclude="*/*/*" -tf file.tar

tar tvf scripts.tar | awk -F/ '{if (NF<4) print }'


drwx------ glens/glens       0 2010-03-17 10:44 scripts/
-rwxr--r-- glens/www-data 1051 2009-07-27 10:42 scripts/my2cnf.pl
-rwxr--r-- glens/www-data  359 2009-08-14 00:01 scripts/pastebin.sh
-rwxr--r-- glens/www-data  566 2009-07-27 10:42 scripts/critic.pl
-rwxr-xr-x glens/glens     981 2009-12-16 09:39 scripts/wiki_sys.pl
-rwxr-xr-x glens/glens    3072 2009-07-28 10:25 scripts/blacklist_update.pl
-rwxr--r-- glens/www-data 18418 2009-07-27 10:42 scripts/sysinfo.pl

Make sure to note, that the number is 3+ however many levels you want, because of the / in the username/group. If you just do

tar tf scripts.tar | awk -F/ '{if (NF<3) print }'

scripts/
scripts/my2cnf.pl
scripts/pastebin.sh
scripts/critic.pl
scripts/wiki_sys.pl
scripts/blacklist_update.pl
scripts/sysinfo.pl

it's only two more.

You could probably pipe the output of ls -R to this awk script, and have the same effect.