It's simple. Assume the following. Your jar file : myJarFile.jar First you can list the contents of the jar to find the file you want using the following command. jar tvf myJarFile.jar Then from the list, pick the file you want and type in the following command to see the content of that file. Assuming the file within the jar is myFolder/myFile.txt , unzip -p myJarFile.jar myFolder/myFile.txt Then the contents of the file could be seen in the command line. Cheers.