Can I decompress a .gzip file with tar?

Question

I downloaded a .gz file with anonymized Census data and around 1 GB compressed. I am unable to inspect it with tar:

$ tar -tf census.csv.gz 
tar: Unrecognized archive format
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors.

but I can inspect and decompress it with gzip:

$ gzip -l census.csv.gz 
  compressed uncompressed  ratio uncompressed_name
   949332135    886077017  -7.2% census.csv
$ gzip -d census.csv.gz 

I can also extract the archive by double-clicking, which opens Archive Utility. I am more confused because the man page for tar says that it has the gzip method.

Can tar list and decompress .gz files?

Notes: gzip is /usr/bin/gzip on macOS High Sierra 10.13.5.

Answer 1

TAR is typically used to merge / demux multiple files to/from single archive (TAR comes from Tape Archive - i.e. working with a data stream to be written to or read from tape), and it can optionally work with a compressed archive (using gzip among other options), but it was not designed as a general purpose compression / decompression tool.

Similarly, GZIP generally only works on a single file (where it compresses more then 1 file, it does each one individually).

A tar.gz (or .tgz) indicates a group of files which have been combined into a single stream with TAR, and then gzipped. TAR can handle these files, but not general purpose single .gz files.

Read more at Wikipedia.