I have a large file foo.tar.xz that contains a lot (say 200000) of files. I figured out that this archive contains some (around 5000) files I don't want. I don't have sufficient disk space to decompress the whole thing onto my disk; additionally, I fear attributes / rights might get lost if I do so. I have enough space to host two copies of the compressed archive though. Is there a tool to remove some of the files from the archive (specified with a regex on the filename) on-the-fly, i.e. without unpacking the archive into individual files?
Remove files from tar archive
tar