See Archive::Tar module.

There are some function used to read the content of the file without untar.

% zcat test.tgz | ack foo   
system("touch foo")
system("rm foo")
system("rm food")
chdir("foo")
%
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You will still need to uncompress the whole file, at least up to the particular file you're interested in, because That's How gzip Works.

The best solution would be for you to show us what code you've written so far, and explain the problems you're having - what it does, what you expected it to do, and what else you've tried. Only then can we help you.

You want ack.

zcat foo.tgz | tar -xvf - some/wanted/file/path
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zcat foo.tgz | tar -xvf - some/wanted/file/path/date*
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Not a perl solution

If you are in unix you can use eval "$(lesspipe)" and then give less yourfilename. It will show you the contents inside the tar.

This is not something you can do "in unix". It is something you might be able to do if you happen to have a lesspipe program installed, but it is in no way a standard behaviour. Most UNIX systems have no such program.

gunzip -c *.tgz | grep target_regex > target.hits
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Or else I'd write a perl script like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use PerlIO:gzip;

for my $file (<*.tgz>) {
    open( T, "<:gzip", $file ) or do {
        warn "open failed on $file: $!\n";
        next;
    };
    while (<T>) {
        print if /target_regex/;
    }
}
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