Getting files names inside a rar/zip file without unzip

Question

Does anyone know if it is possible to get the name of files inside a rar/zip without having to unrar/unzip the file.. and if yes, is there a way to block it or make difficult..

Thanks

Answer 1

The -l flag to unzip(1) does just that:

-l list archive files (short format). The names, uncompressed file sizes and modification dates and times of the specified files are printed, along with totals for all files specified.

unrar(1) has the l option:

l List archive content.

Answer 2

The file names in a zip file are visible even if the data is encrypted. If you want to hide the names, the easy solution is to zip the zip file encrypted.

Later versions of PKZip do have an option to encrypt the file names as well with –cd=encrypt. (cd means central directory.)