I have found the question How to determine if data is valid tar file without a file?, but I was wondering: is there a ready made command line solution?
8 Answers
What about just getting a listing of the tarball and throw away the output, rather than decompressing the file?
tar -tzf my_tar.tar.gz >/dev/null
Edited as per comment. Thanks zrajm!
Edit as per comment. Thanks Frozen Flame! This test in no way implies integrity of the data. Because it was designed as a tape archival utility most implementations of tar will allow multiple copies of the same file!
you could probably use the gzip -t option to test the files integrity
http://linux.about.com/od/commands/l/blcmdl1_gzip.htm
To test the gzip file is not corrupt:
gunzip -t file.tar.gz
To test the tar file inside is not corrupt:
gunzip -c file.tar.gz | tar -t > /dev/null
As part of the backup you could probably just run the latter command and check the value of $? afterwards for a 0 (success) value. If either the tar or the gzip has an issue, $? will have a non zero value.
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