Check the total content size of a tar gz file

How can I extract the size of the total uncompressed file data in a .tar.gz file from command line?

This works for any file size:

zcat archive.tar.gz | wc -c

For files smaller than 4Gb you could also use the -l option with gzip:

$ gzip -l compressed.tar.gz
     compressed        uncompressed  ratio uncompressed_name
            132               10240  99.1% compressed.tar

This will sum the total content size of the extracted files:

$ tar tzvf archive.tar.gz | sed 's/ \+/ /g' | cut -f3 -d' ' | sed '2,$s/^/+ /' | paste -sd' ' | bc

The output is given in bytes.

Explanation: tar tzvf lists the files in the archive in verbose format like ls -l. sed and cut isolate the file size field. The second sed puts a + in front of every size except the first and paste concatenates them, giving a sum expression that is then evaluated by bc.

Note that this doesn't include metadata, so the disk space taken up by the files when you extract them is going to be larger - potentially many times larger if you have a lot of very small files.

The command gzip -l archive.tar.gz doesn't work correctly with file sizes greater than 2Gb. I would recommend zcat archive.tar.gz | wc --bytes instead for really large files.

I know this is an old answer; but I wrote a tool just for this two years ago. It’s called gzsize and it gives you the uncompressed size of a gzip'ed file without actually decompressing the whole file on disk:

$ gzsize <your file>

Use the following command:

tar -xzf archive.tar.gz --to-stdout|wc -c