I have also written a tar format extractor, which is still in use for the backup system at Fastmail: https://metacpan.org/pod/Archive::Tar::Stream https://meta

I have also written a tar format extractor, which is still in use for the backup system at Fastmail: https://metacpan.org/pod/Archive::Tar::Stream https://metacpan.org/pod/Archive::Tar::Stream It's capable of reading and writing tar files, and the big benefit over extracting is that you can repack a tar by (as the name says) streaming it, with a decision callback which allows you to discard, keep, or "edit" a file - where edit does unpack to a temporary file at which point you can arbitrarily change the file or the header info and then keep or discard once you're done.