List contents of multiple jar files

You need to pass -n 1 to xargs to force it to run a separate jar command for each filename that it gets from find:

find -name "*.jar" | xargs -n 1 jar tf

Otherwise xargs's command line looks like jar tf file1.jar file2.jar..., which has a different meaning to what is intended.

A useful debugging technique is to stick echo before the command to be run by xargs:

find -name "*.jar" | xargs echo jar tf

This would print out the full jar command instead of executing it, so that you can see what's wrong with it.

I faced a similar situation where I need to search for a class in a list of jar files present in a directory. Also I wanted to know from which jar file the class belongs to. I used this below code snippet(shell script) and found out to be helpful. Below script will list down the jar files that contains the class to be searched.

#!/bin/shLOOK_FOR="codehaus/xfire/spring"for i in `find . -name "*jar"`do  echo "Looking in $i ..."  jar tvf $i | grep $LOOK_FOR > /dev/null  if [ $? == 0 ]  then    echo "==> Found \"$LOOK_FOR\" in $i"  fidone

Shell script taken from : http://alvinalexander.com/blog/post/java/shell-script-search-search-multiple-jar-files-class-pattern

You can also use -exec option of find

find . -name "*.jar" -exec jar tf {} \;