tar

"GNU 'tar' saves many files together into a single tape or disk archive, and can restore individual files from the archive." - man tar on linux

"tar - manipulate tape archives" - man tar on macOS

Examples

Deal with leading slash quirks

Some tar archives have a leading ./ stored for every filename:

$ curl -fsSL https://github.com/vectordotdev/vector/releases/download/v0.20.1/vector-0.20.1-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz | tar -tzf -
./vector-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/
./vector-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/README.md
./vector-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/bin/
./vector-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/bin/vector

and some do not

$ curl -fsSL "https://get.helm.sh/helm-v3.8.2-linux-amd64.tar.gz" | tar -tzf -
linux-amd64/
linux-amd64/helm
linux-amd64/LICENSE
linux-amd64/README.md

This alters the syntax when you want to extract a single file. You need to give the exact filename seen in tar -t to extract a single file. If you want to never have to deal with that leading ./, you can add --no-anchored

danielh@cs-462709900404-default:~/temp/2022-04-20$ curl -fsSL https://github.com/vectordotdev/vector/releases/download/v0.20.1/vector-0.20.1-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz | tar -tzf - vector-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/bin/
tar: vector-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/bin: Not found in archive
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors
danielh@cs-462709900404-default:~/temp/2022-04-20$ curl -fsSL https://github.com/vectordotdev/vector/releases/download/v0.20.1/vector-0.20.1-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz | tar -tzf - --no-anchored vector-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/bin/
./vector-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/bin/
./vector-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/bin/vector