Is there a way to search a compressed archive?

[g666gle]

I am currently using tar to make an archive of many small files so there is more history for the compression. For example, I have "file.tar.zst" I'm curious if there is any possible way to search through the files without having to decompress the archive?

[Cyan4973]

Not that I'm aware of.
It can't be faster than searching though a non-compressed .tar file,
and as far as I know, -t and --list require a complete scan of the file.

[nabijaczleweli]

Well, to traverse the entire archive, you need to traverse the entire archive, but you can avoid writing it to disk like this zstd -d owo.tar.zst -c 2>/dev/null | tar -t, for example

[Cyan4973]

I believe @nabijaczleweli answers this question quite cleanly.