cleanly reading compressed backups

[Jim Stapleton]

I have several disk images, and I'd like to grab files off of them,
but I'm not sure how.

I made these images by booting up a linux boot CD (it seemed easier
than a BSD cd at the time, and the results should be the same), and
make a backup as such:

dd if=/dev/sda | bzip2 -z9 | split [forgot the args, basically 1GB
files that are bsd-backup-(date)-??]

anyway, without uncompressing them back to disk (it's the same
slice/partitions as I have now), what's the easiest way to get read
access to these contents of the files in these backups?

Thanks,
-Jim Stapleton