What is a tar file?
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What is a "tar" (tape archive) file? A deep dive into the history and inner workings of the tar file format to create better optimized archives.
    • palordrolap@fedia.io
      4·
      3 hours ago

      And now you join the thousands of us who have heard of it but never have any use for it.

      Had you heard of cpio? I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have heard of that either if it hadn’t been mentioned in a Unix book I bought in the 90s.

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      9·
      9 hours ago

      I’d say pixz is considerably more interesting to improve tar.

      https://github.com/vasi/pixz

      Used as a compressor with tar, it adds:

      • Parallel compression/decompression, increasingly important with many-core processors.

      • Indexed access. Tarballs, unlike, say, zip or 7zip, don’t normally support jumping right to the point in an archive where a file lives.

      It’s LZMA-based, like xz, lzip, or 7zip. Good-but-slow compression, faster decompression than bzip.