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.
    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      5·
      5 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.