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.
    • palordrolap@fedia.io
      4·
      4 hours ago

      And now you join the thousands of us who have heard of it but never have any use for it.

      Had you heard of cpio? I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have heard of that either if it hadn’t been mentioned in a Unix book I bought in the 90s.

        • TechSquidTV@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          2·
          1 hour ago

          I mean officially. In the POSIX standard, it has officially been replaced. de facto standard as by users, it has remained dominant. We have just not been following POSIX as closely as we could (and we don’t have any reason to).

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      10·
      11 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.