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You can also use vim

vim filename.tar.gz

less can also open gz-compressed and uncompressed tar archives. It gives you a lovely ls -l style output too:

$ less ~/src/compiz_0.9.7.8-0ubuntu1.6.debian.tar.gz

drwxrwxr-x 0/0               0 2012-09-21 11:41 debian/

drwxrwxr-x 0/0               0 2012-08-09 13:32 debian/source/

-rw-rw-r-- 0/0              12 2012-08-09 13:32 debian/source/format

-rw-rw-r-- 0/0              25 2012-08-09 13:32 debian/libdecoration0-dev.docs

-rw-rw-r-- 0/0              25 2012-08-09 13:32 debian/compiz-dev.docs

-rw-rw-r-- 0/0             347 2012-08-09 13:32 debian/compiz-core.install

-rw-rw-r-- 0/0             125 2012-08-09 13:32 debian/libdecoration0-dev.install

...

And because it's less, you can scroll through it, search it, etc. However it fails miserably with other compression algorithms (in my experience).

You could use the z command: zcat, zless, zgrep.

To view a files content use:

zcat file.gz   

To grep something use:

zgrep test file.gz   

To check difference between files use:

zdiff file1.gz file2.gz

These are just a few example, there are many more.

Well, that depends on the file. Most (de)compression programs have a flag that lists an archive's contents.

1. 
   

   tar/tar.gz/tgz/tar.xz/tar.bz2/tbz files

   
   
   

   $ tar tf foo.tgz 
   
   dir1/
   
   dir1/subdir1/
   
   dir1/subdir1/file
   
   dir1/subdir2/
   
   dir1/subdir2/file
   
   dir2/
   
   

   
   


2. 
   

   zip files

   
   
   

   $ zip -sf foo.zip 
   
   Archive contains:
   
     dir1/
   
     dir2/
   
     dir1/subdir1/
   
     dir1/subdir1/file
   
     dir1/subdir2/
   
     dir1/subdir2/file
   
   Total 6 entries (0 bytes)
   
   

   
   


3. 
   

   7zip files

   
   
   

   $ 7z l foo.7z 
   
   
   
   7-Zip [64] 9.20  Copyright (c) 1999-2010 Igor Pavlov  2010-11-18
   
   p7zip Version 9.20 (locale=en_US.utf8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,4 CPUs)
   
   
   
   Listing archive: foo.7z
   
   
   
   --
   
   Path = foo.7z
   
   Type = 7z
   
   Solid = -
   
   Blocks = 0
   
   Physical Size = 168
   
   Headers Size = 168
   
   
   
      Date      Time    Attr         Size   Compressed  Name
   
   ------------------- ----- ------------ ------------  ------------------------
   
   2015-03-30 19:00:07 ....A            0            0  dir1/subdir1/file
   
   2015-03-30 19:00:07 ....A            0            0  dir1/subdir2/file
   
   2015-03-30 19:07:32 D....            0            0  dir2
   
   2015-03-30 19:00:07 D....            0            0  dir1/subdir2
   
   2015-03-30 19:00:07 D....            0            0  dir1/subdir1
   
   2015-03-30 19:00:06 D....            0            0  dir1
   
   ------------------- ----- ------------ ------------  ------------------------
   
                                        0            0  2 files, 4 folders
   
   

   
   


4. 
   

   rar files

   
   
   

    $ rar v foo.rar 
   
   
   
   RAR 4.20   Copyright (c) 1993-2012 Alexander Roshal   9 Jun 2012
   
   Trial version             Type RAR -? for help
   
   
   
   Archive foo.rar
   
   
   
   Pathname/Comment
   
                     Size   Packed Ratio  Date   Time     Attr      CRC   Meth Ver
   
   -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   
    dir1/subdir1/file
   
                        0        8   0% 30-03-15 19:00 -rw-r--r-- 00000000 m3b 2.9
   
    dir1/subdir2/file
   
                        0        8   0% 30-03-15 19:00 -rw-r--r-- 00000000 m3b 2.9
   
    dir1/subdir1
   
                        0        0   0% 30-03-15 19:00 drwxr-xr-x 00000000 m0  2.0
   
    dir1/subdir2
   
                        0        0   0% 30-03-15 19:00 drwxr-xr-x 00000000 m0  2.0
   
    dir1
   
                        0        0   0% 30-03-15 19:00 drwxr-xr-x 00000000 m0  2.0
   
    dir2
   
                        0        0   0% 30-03-15 19:07 drwxr-xr-x 00000000 m0  2.0
   
   -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   
       6                0       16   0%
   
   

   
   

That's most of the more popular archive formats. With all this in mind, you could write a little script that uses the appropriate command depending on the extension of the file you give to it:

#!/usr/bin/env bash



for file in "$@"

do

    printf "n-----nArchive '%s'n-----n" "$file"

    ## Get the file's extension

    ext=${file##*.}

    ## Special case for compressed tar files. They sometimes

    ## have extensions like tar.bz2 or tar.gz etc.

    [[ "$(basename "$file" ."$ext")" =~ .tar$ ]] && ext="tgz"



    case $ext in

        7z)

            type 7z >/dev/null 2>&1 && 7z l "$file" || 

            echo "ERROR: no 7z program installed"

            ;;

        tar|tbz|tgz)

            type tar >/dev/null 2>&1 && tar tf "$file"|| 

            echo "ERROR: no tar program installed"

            ;;

        rar)

            type rar >/dev/null 2>&1 && rar v "$file"|| 

            echo "ERROR: no rar program installed"

            ;;

        zip)

            type zip >/dev/null 2>&1 && zip -sf "$file"|| 

            echo "ERROR: no zip program installed"

            ;;

        *)

            echo "Unknown extension: '$ext', skipping..."

            ;;

    esac

done

Save that script in your PATH and make it executable. You can then list the contents of any archive:

$ list_archive.sh foo.rar foo.tar.bz foo.tar.gz foo.tbz foo.zip



-----

Archive 'foo.rar'

-----



RAR 4.20   Copyright (c) 1993-2012 Alexander Roshal   9 Jun 2012

Trial version             Type RAR -? for help



Archive foo.rar



Pathname/Comment

                  Size   Packed Ratio  Date   Time     Attr      CRC   Meth Ver

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 dir1/subdir1/file

                     0        8   0% 30-03-15 19:00 -rw-r--r-- 00000000 m3b 2.9

 dir1/file

                     0        8   0% 30-03-15 19:29 -rw-r--r-- 00000000 m3b 2.9

 dir1/subdir1

                     0        0   0% 30-03-15 19:00 drwxr-xr-x 00000000 m0  2.0

 dir1

                     0        0   0% 30-03-15 19:29 drwxr-xr-x 00000000 m0  2.0

 dir2

                     0        0   0% 30-03-15 19:07 drwxr-xr-x 00000000 m0  2.0

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    5                0       16   0%





-----

Archive 'foo.tar.bz'

-----

dir1/

dir1/subdir1/

dir1/subdir1/file

dir1/file

dir2/



-----

Archive 'foo.tar.gz'

-----

dir1/

dir1/subdir1/

dir1/subdir1/file

dir1/file

dir2/



-----

Archive 'foo.tbz'

-----

dir1/

dir1/subdir1/

dir1/subdir1/file

dir1/file

dir2/



-----

Archive 'foo.zip'

-----

Archive contains:

  dir1/

  dir1/subdir1/

  dir1/subdir1/file

  dir1/file

  dir2/

Total 5 entries (0 bytes)

And since someone mentioned that lesser editor, naturally, emacs can also do this:

tar's -t flag will list contents for you. Add that to your other flags (so -tvfz for a tar.gz, -tvfj for a tar.bz2, etc) and you can browse without extracting. From there you can extract single files quite easily

tar -xvfz mybackup.tar.gz path/to/file

The big problem with tar is remembering all the other flags. So I usually rely on 7z (of the p7zip-full package) to do all my archiving. I won't claim it is entirely better but it supports almost everything (without having to specify compression type) and the arguments are logical.

7z l archive.ext

7z e archive.ext path/to/file

It's certainly less capable, but you don't need the man page to use it.

There's also Midnight Commander (mc). This is an all-around badass for quasi-graphical terminal-based file management and with some light testing it just let you browse into both .tar.gz and .7z archives. I'm not sure how many others it supports.

Why not use vim to browse your archive and open files (at least text-like files):

vim archive.tar.gz

Press the arrow keys to scroll and Enter to open a file.

Midnight Commander (mc) also has a good compressed file viewer, although I consider this a bit of cheating since mc is a file manager, albeit a text-based one.

Also, if all you want is to see what's inside compressed archives, you could learn the "view" command for each compressor. tar tzvf will show you the contents of a tar file, unzip -l will do it for a zip file, and so on.

Using
view filename.tar.gz
will also work. much in the same way vim does, but without write permissions.

lesspipe is a shell script installed by default as part of the less package that can list the contents of a tar.gz archive, as well as a range of other common archive file formats.

$ lesspipe example.tar.gz

drwxrwxr-x ubuntu/ubuntu     0 2018-11-16 05:32 example/

-rw-rw-r-- ubuntu/ubuntu     7 2018-11-16 05:32 example/ask.txt

-rw-rw-r-- ubuntu/ubuntu     7 2018-11-16 05:32 example/ubuntu.txt

It is called by the less command (see Oli's answer) as an input preprocessor if the $LESSOPEN environment variable is set appropriately.

If feeling adventurous, take a peak at vi /usr/bin/lesspipe to see what commands it uses. For files matching the tar.gz extension, we can see that it uses tar tzvf under the hood along with the --force-local option to disable an obscure feature of tar that would otherwise confuse colons in the filename with a command to use a remote tape drive:

*.tar.gz|*.tgz|*.tar.z|*.tar.dz)

        tar tzvf "$1" --force-local

Note that because it's primarily designed as a preprocessor for less, it won't output anything if it doesn't recognise the file type. I noticed that some .tar.gz files I downloaded wouldn't work because they didn't actually use gzip compression despite the filename.