How to view tar gzip contents without decompressing it

Tar files (.tar) are based on the old “tape archive” format. So if you think of how a program would write files to tape, one at a time, in order, .tar files do the same thing, so they don’t have a table of contents. However, there are some options that let you scan the .tar or other archive file and write the output to stdout or a file.

This forum has a pretty good discussion on this topic.