How to edit tar files without extracting to the filesystem?

Sometimes I have a problem like “I want to move a subdirectory up a level in a tar archive and I don’t want to do a bunch of stuff with files on the filesystem”

how to do a tar extract | create pipe on the fly?

This is the answer to that.

tar -f "${DISTDIR}/rust-weechat-39219d770f1684a3ff05bf7853c87bd019592f9e.crate" \
    -x \
    --wildcards 'rust-weechat-39219d770f1684a3ff05bf7853c87bd019592f9e/weechat-*' \
    --strip-components=1 \
    --to-command="tar -h -u -f ${DISTDIR}"'/"${TAR_FILENAME%%/*}.crate" /dev/stdin --transform="s@.*@$TAR_FILENAME@"' \