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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
by 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.