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>scanning the entire archive would be ridiculously slow on a system with <1MB/s throughput a some kilobytes of RAM That's how tar works. Just the other day I w
by GoblinSlayer 5y ago
>scanning the entire archive would be ridiculously slow on a system with <1MB/s throughput a some kilobytes of RAM
That's how tar works. Just the other day I was making a backup and streamed 5gb of data as a tar archive, opening it in the archiver took a lot of time.
- sdfjkl 5y ago> >scanning the entire archive would be ridiculously slow on a system with <1MB/s throughput a some kilobytes of RAM > That's how tar works. Just the other day I was making a backup and streamed 5gb of data as a tar archive, opening it in the archiver took a lot of time. That's because tar is the tape archiver, specifically written for a medium whose very nature is linear reading/writing and where skipping around was highly impractical or even impossible.
- codedokode 5y agoBut having a file directory would be useful even with a tape because you wouldn't need to read the whole tape to get the list of files inside.
- josefx 5y agoCould that just be the archiver? I often skip UIs since they seem to take longer to show the file contents than it takes me to unpack the entire archive on the command line. Worse I am convinced some UIs end up unpacking the entire archive repeatedly when you select only two or three files.
- account42 5y agoNo, tar does not have a central directory record so you need to skip over all data even just to list files. Of course you can have additionall slowdowns on top of that by doing stupid things.