tarfile

The tarfile module is included in the core Python distribution as a portable utility for reading and writing tar archives. This module is especially convenient for z/OS users to transparently handle commonly used compressed tar archives, which are currently not available in the native tar tool.

For more information about tarfile, see tarfile in the official Python documentation.

You can extract compressed archives by using tarfile as a single operation in the following ways:

In command-line mode:
```
python3 -m tarfile -e archive.tar.gz
```

In a Python script:

import tarfile
tar = tarfile.open("archive.tar.gz")
tar.extractall()
tar.close()

Processing the above archive using native z/OS tools would involve multiple steps using tar and gzip.