title: How to speed up the extraction of a large tgz file with lots of small files?
body: <p>I have a tar archive (17GB) which consists of many small files (all files &lt;1MB ).
  How do I use this archive.</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Do I extract it ? using 7-zip on my laptop says it will take 20hrs (and I think it will take even more)</li>
  <li>Can I read/browse the contents of the file without extracting it? If yes, then how?</li>
  <li>Is there any other option?</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>It is actually a processed wikipedia dataset on which I am supposed to perform some Natural Language Processing.</p>
  
  <p>Platform Windows/Linux is not an issue; anything will do, as long as it gets the jobs done as quickly as possible.</p>