How do I delete a single file from a tar.gz archive

Question

I have a huge tarbell archive with an excessively large or corrupt error_log that causes the archive to hang when attempting to extract it. Is there a way to remove this from th

Answer 1

As mentioned in the comments it's not possible to remove the file using tar, but you can exclude the file when extracting:

tar -zxvf file.tar.gz --exclude "file_to_exclude"