How to read MANIFEST.MF file from JAR using Bash

Depending on your distribution, install the unzip package. Then simply issue

unzip -p YOUR_FILE.jar META-INF/MANIFEST.MF

This will dump the contents to STDOUT.

HTH

$ tar xfO some.jar META-INF/MANIFEST.MF

x extracts and O redirects to stdout.

Note: Seem to work only in bsdtar, not GNU tar.

use unzip:

$ unzip -q -c $JARFILE_PATH META-INF/MANIFEST.MF

that will quietly (-q) read the path META-INF/MANIFEST.MF from the jarfile (which is compressed using the zip format) to stdout (-c). You can then pipe the output to other command to answer questions like 'what is the main class for this jar:

$ unzip -q -c $JARFILE_PATH META-INF/MANIFEST.MF | grep 'Main-Class' | cut -d ':' -f 2

(this removes all lines which don't contain the string Main-Class, then splits the line at :, keeping only the second field, the class name). Of course, either define $JARFILE_PATH appropriately or replace $JARFILE_PATH with the path to a jarfile you're interested in.

$ unzip -q -c myarchive.jar META-INF/MANIFEST.MF

• -q will suppress verbose output from the unzip program
• -c will extract to stdout

Example:

$ unzip -q -c commons-lang-2.4.jar META-INF/MANIFEST.MF

Manifest-Version: 1.0
Ant-Version: Apache Ant 1.7.0
Created-By: 1.5.0_13-119 (Apple Inc.)
Package: org.apache.commons.lang
Extension-Name: commons-lang
Specification-Version: 2.4
Specification-Vendor: Apache Software Foundation
Specification-Title: Commons Lang
Implementation-Version: 2.4
Implementation-Vendor: Apache Software Foundation
Implementation-Title: Commons Lang
Implementation-Vendor-Id: org.apache
X-Compile-Source-JDK: 1.3
X-Compile-Target-JDK: 1.2

Alternatively you can use -p instead of -q -c.

-p extract files to pipe (stdout). Nothing but the file data is sent to stdout, and the files are always extracted in binary format, just as they are stored (no conversions).