Shell scripts aren't particularly well suited to skipping over chunks of data that may contain data that is binary (rather than textual) contents of a file. Even if all of the files that are included in the tar file are text files, the shell and awk aren't necessarily a good fit for this job. Instead of showing us a broken awk script that doesn't do what you want to do; why don't you tell us what you are trying to do and show us output from the command:

Code:

tar -tvf filename.tar.gz

or if that doesn't work:

Code:

zcat filename.tar.gz | tar -tvf -

and show us exactly what output you want your shell/awk script to produce when given this gzipped tar archive (or the unzipped tar archive) as input?