tar doesn’t even provide compression. Which may be what you want. If you have a weak CPU and a big storage device why would you waste the cpu cycles? I know I’ve removed the compression step in AUR builds for example. But if you don’t know what it does, maybe an all in one solution like 7zip or winrar might be a more attractive prospect.
I very rarely list the content of compressed files, so that doesn’t bother me much.
Back in the day the trick to get better compression on zip files was to first make an uncompressed zip file, and then put that in a compressed zip file. tar did that all by itself!
The pixz compressor provides parallized compression/decompression (desirable on modern CPUs), uses LZMA (like 7zip or xz), and provides indexed access when used as tar's compressor. The last of these is what you want.
The tar format doesn’t, but the tar command has command line flags for a number of compression algorithms, and if your algorithm of choice doesn’t have a flag, you can just pipe it to the compression program.
tar doesn’t even provide compression. Which may be what you want. If you have a weak CPU and a big storage device why would you waste the cpu cycles? I know I’ve removed the compression step in AUR builds for example. But if you don’t know what it does, maybe an all in one solution like 7zip or winrar might be a more attractive prospect.
Compressed tars suck anyway since you need to decompress them in order to get the list of files inside, unlike in any other sane archive format.
I very rarely list the content of compressed files, so that doesn’t bother me much.
Back in the day the trick to get better compression on zip files was to first make an uncompressed zip file, and then put that in a compressed zip file.
tardid that all by itself!I mean that’s what GUI archivers do when you open the file.
So tar is only useful for some kind of automatic workflows where archives are processed automatically. Like what package managers do.
The pixz compressor provides parallized compression/decompression (desirable on modern CPUs), uses LZMA (like 7zip or
xz), and provides indexed access when used astar'scompressor. The last of these is what you want.https://github.com/vasi/pixz
pixzis packaged in Debian-family distros.The tar format doesn’t, but the
tarcommand has command line flags for a number of compression algorithms, and if your algorithm of choice doesn’t have a flag, you can just pipe it to the compression program.