No solution is offered in this thread for the titular issue. Turns out I had a back-up of the modified archive. I was unable to discover any method of recovering files deleted from an archive.

Two Lessons you might take before you leave:
1. Always keep a backup.
2. Always keep your backups Read Only!

Is there any way to recover files deleted from a tar.gz archive?

I was looking through an archive (tar.gz) when instead of using "Backspace" to delete a portion of the address (in the address bar of the window), I hit "Delete". Instead of deleting the highlighted part of the address, the archive was instructed to delete all the files in the archive. Before I could react, all of my archived files had been deleted (gigabytes of info).

Unless my understanding of archives is flawed, I understand myself to be pretty solidly screwed.

Is there any way to recover these files once they've been deleted from an archive? My filesystem is ext4.

Thanks for any helpful direction you might give.

You could try:progname 5559 user 22r REG 8,5 1282410 1294349 /path/to/file
Notice the number in the second column is 5559 and the number in the fourth column is 22. The command to restore that file is:

Thanks for the quick reply. Unfortunately, I had not deleted the actual tar.gz, but files within the tar.gz. I did test your advice with a dummy tar.gz, but the terminal simply returned another prompt after a few moments of deliberating the command you offered. Thus, I was unable to actually test whether this might work for files deleted from within an archive.

Thankfully, this test was unnecessary due to my paranoid redundancy. I managed to find a back-up of the archive which I hastily chmod-ed to read-only (per my usual practice. not sure why this wasn't so initially).

Still, thanks so much for your willingness to help, micxz.