Is there a way to read tar.gz top lines without uncompression?

Question

I have 1000+ *.tar.gz files with size 4G+ each. But the only thing that I needed is the top 5 lines of each file. I am wondering whether there is a fast way to read these lines without uncompressing process (it takes 3-5 minutes to uncompress a single file). My platform is Linux.

Possible duplicate of [is partial gz decompression possible?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23676116/is-partial-gz-decompression-possible) — 123, Jul 22 '16 at 13:18
I think you can use `split -b X` to take only the first X byes of the file, then decompress — Chris_Rands, Jul 22 '16 at 13:24

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 22 '16 at 13:19

No, there isn't any faster way.

The issue is that .tar file is stream of concatenated original files (with some meta information). gzip then adds compression of full archive. Therefore even to just get the list of the files the archive has to be uncompressed first.

Is there a way to read tar.gz top lines without uncompression?

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