Yeah, maybe... but I wrote https://metacpan.org/pod/Archive::Tar::Stream https://metacpan.org/pod/Archive::Tar::Stream without too much trouble and it's been ha

Yeah, maybe... but I wrote https://metacpan.org/pod/Archive::Tar::Stream https://metacpan.org/pod/Archive::Tar::Stream without too much trouble and it's been happily managing all our backups for over 10 years since (it didn't get released to CPAN straight away). It helps that we're only ever appending gzipped tar fragments, and we have a tracking database format to know where the offsets in the uncompressed stream are: https://fastmail.blog/2015/12/21/building-a-backup-system-for-cyrus/ https://fastmail.blog/2015/12/21/building-a-backup-system-fo... But yeah - much worse if you're parsing arbitrary tar files than if you create everything yourself and just have to make it readable by gnu tar and that's about it.