How to read a tarball

[Ed Greshko]

Stephen Liu wrote:

>>From its HELP:-
> Ark is a program for managing various archive formats within the KDE
> environment. Archives can be viewed, extracted, created and modified
> from within Ark. The program can handle various formats such as tar,
> gzip, bzip2, zip, rar and lha (if appropriate command-line programs are
> installed). Ark can work closely with Konqueror in the KDE environment
> to handle archives, if you install the Konqueror Integration plugin
> available in the kdeaddons package.
> 
> I'm curious to know whether there is an alternative, i.e. another
> method, to view, retrieve and re-add file after edited without
> decompressing it.

Please understand one thing....  Ark *is* uncompressing the file in
order to extract the contents in order to make it available for
modification.  It is just hiding the mechanics from you.  The
uncompressed data may only exist in memory...but it does exist.