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Right, but what business does tar have compressing anything in the first place? It's a tape archiver. You can pipe its input/output to compress or gzip or bzip2
by mprovost 7y ago
Right, but what business does tar have compressing anything in the first place? It's a tape archiver. You can pipe its input/output to compress or gzip or bzip2. Early versions didn't have any ability to compress/decompress archives and relied on external tools, but then that functionality was absorbed, increasing the size of the codebase. And as you point out, every time a new compression method is invented, someone needs to update a bunch of tools instead of just installing one new utility.
- dylan604 7y ago> but what business does tar have compressing anything in the first place? It's a tape archiver. Most of the tape devices themselves had/have compression on them so that tar did not need to do it. However, that compression was pretty weak (2:1), so giving tar the ability to use bzip2 and send the compressed data stream to the tape (bypassing the hardware compression) gave the user much more convenience. Also, older systems probably were bad at doing the compression in real-time, so it probably slowed down the write to tape. I'm just guessing, I have no experience writing to tape from such an old system. I'm not really upset by tar geting some extra features.
- int_19h 7y agoIs compression support in tar built-in? I always thought that those switches simply use gunzip etc under the hood.