How to access .tar inside .gz or .zst ?

[MaxX]

How can I read inside .tar files that are stored in .gz or .zst ?
WinRar can open them without extraction them to %temp%, but TC does unpack them. That's not useful with 40GB .tar files...

[ghisler(Author)]

You cannot get the content of a TAR file without unpacking it first, the names are stored with each file content, so they are scattered across the entire TAR file. WinRAR probably just unpacks the TAR to RAM when it reads the names, so it has to unpack the TAR file a second time when it wants to unpack files, or modify the TAR file.

[MaxX]

Yes, WinRar does the first read to get tar's contents. Then it reads it once again for unpack process. No problem there for me.
May you do something like that? AFAIK, TC now can cache the archive's structure once opened for some time. That can help here.

[ghisler(Author)]

Unfortunately it would be very inefficient to view or edit individual files from that tar.gz file: For example, if the tar contains 100'000 files, and you want to view a directory (e.g. with Ctrl+Q) located near the end, TC would have to unpack the entire archive again and again and again for each file you want to view.

[MaxX]

But we do the same for any solid 7z or rar file. No problem there.

[ghisler(Author)]

Of course there is the same problem with solid archives when they reach a certain size, e.g. 40GB in your above example.

[MaxX]

40GB is just huge example. 2-6 GB are more often. But the system SSD's writing resource means more than reading twice when you read these TARs every day.