• After creating the TarInputStream, you start out by calling getNextEntry.
• You do this until it returns null (similar to how you would read a textfile line-by-line with BufferedReader)
• tar doesn’t actually compress anything, it just concatenates the data in a sequence of <header> <data> series. After calling getNextEntry the TarInputStream is positioned right at the start of the data for the given entry (if it is a file, which you should also check)
• To read the data associated with the TarEntry you just obtained, you have two possibilities:
  • You can use the the copyEntryContents method on the stream to put the data in an other stream (in memory, in an other file, etc). Just make sure that you have enough memory / disk space to do so
  • You can read the contents directly from the stream. For example you can layer a GZIPInputStream (or CBZip2InputStream) over the TarInputStream if you have a gz / bz2 in a tar (usually it’s the reverse, this was the case for my little parser for example)

One thing to watch out for if you choose the second method, is the fact that TarInputStream is very sensible to positioning. So if the stream you layer on top of it has a off-by-one error (ie. it reads a couple of bytes more than the actual size of the data), you can quickly get a mysterious IOException which says something along the lines of “reading from output buffer”.

My solution to the problem was to layer a custom FilterStream on top of TarInputStream before handing it over to an other stream which does two things:

1. it makes sure that the stream on top of it can read only N bytes, where N is the size of the entry and
2. when close is called on it, it doesn’t propagate it to the TarInputStream (so that it doesn’t get closed and further entries can be processed)

Below you can see this filter stream:

public class SizeLimiterInputStream extends FilterInputStream {
  final long maxSize;
  final InputStream base;
  long alreadyRead;
  
  public SizeLimitInputStream(InputStream in, long maxSize) {
    super(in);
    this.maxSize = maxSize;
    alreadyRead = 0;
    base = in;
  }
  
  @Override
  public synchronized int available() throws IOException {		
    long a = base.available();
    if (alreadyRead + a > maxSize)
      a = maxSize - alreadyRead;
    return (int)a;			
  }
  
  @Override
  public void close() {
    // do nothing
  }
  
  @Override
  public boolean markSupported() {
    return false;
  }
  
  @Override
  public void mark(int readlimit) {
    // do nothing
  }
  
  @Override
  public void reset() throws IOException {
    // do nothing 
  }
  
  @Override
  public synchronized int read() throws IOException {
    if (alreadyRead >= maxSize)
      throw new EOFException();
    int r = base.read();
    alreadyRead += 1;
    return r;
  }
  
  @Override
  public synchronized int read(byte[] b) throws IOException {
    return read(b, 0, b.length);
  }
  
  @Override
  public synchronized int read(byte[] b, int off, int len) throws IOException {
    if (alreadyRead >= maxSize)
      return -1;
    if (alreadyRead + len > maxSize)
      len = (int)(maxSize - alreadyRead);
    int r = base.read(b, off, len);
    alreadyRead += r;
    return r;
  }
  
  @Override
  public synchronized long skip(long n) throws IOException {
    if (n < 0)
      return 0;
    if (alreadyRead >= maxSize)
      return 0;
    if (alreadyRead + n > maxSize)
      n = maxSize - alreadyRead;
    long r = base.skip(n);
    alreadyRead += r;
    return r;
  }
    
}

So your code would like something along the lines of:

TarInputStream tis = new TarInputStream(fileInputStream);
TarEntry tarEntry;
while ((tarEntry = tis.getNextEntry()) != null) {
  if (tarEntry.isDirectory()) continue;

  InputStream tmpIn = new SizeLimitInputStream(tis, tarEntry.getSize());				
  // process tmpIn - create other streams on top of it for example ...
}
tis.close();

Hope this helps.

Picture taken from quapan’s photostream with permission.