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Say I have unpacked a gz-compressed tar file, and do not remember what changes I made to the unpacked files, or I archived a folder a while ago and want to know what has changed to the files since.

I can use tar -zd to get an overview. Then, say it shows me file foo has changed. How can I see the changes in this file, i.e. the difference between the file on my file system and the (older) file in the archive (ideally in vimdiff, but diff output would be fine too)?

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2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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Open the compressed tar file in vim, move the cursor to foo and hit Enter. Then execute

:vert diffsplit local/path/to/foo
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Use tar ... -O along with process substitution in bash.

diff ... <( tar ... -O ... file.ext ) file.ext
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  • 1
    obtaining a diff with one command line is also nice; after some playing around (not sure how/why it works) diff <(tar -xzOf archive.tgz dir/file.ext) dir/file.ext gave me the correct result
    – Kyss Tao
    Apr 2, 2012 at 17:17
  • (correction: I think I do understand it, <( ... ) transforms the stdout of ... into a file)
    – Kyss Tao
    Apr 2, 2012 at 17:33

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