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    why do you think that tar is gunzipping the file? Commented Sep 30, 2012 at 7:27
  • Try gzip -dc my.tar.gz | tar tf -. Commented Sep 30, 2012 at 8:04
  • It always gets stuck at a large gz file, and when I look at top in another shell window I can see gzip running next to tar. Commented Sep 30, 2012 at 9:16
  • I don't really understand you problem here, but it seems that inside that .tar.gz are other .gz files? If that's the case, then the archive is wrong to begin with. a .tar.gz file, is a gziped tar-file, which contains a collection of uncompressed files. Everything else is pretty much done by an idiot. Commented Sep 30, 2012 at 12:56
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    As others have pointed out, tar has to read .tar.gz files sequentially, so it can't find out what's after "huge_mysql_file.gz" without reading it in to get to the next file in the archive. If you need to view the contents of a .tar.gz file frequently, you can always create a text file containing the files list. e.g. tar tvzf my.tar.gz > my.tar.gz.list. you can then read that .list file with less or grep it etc. Commented Sep 30, 2012 at 22:43