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Thread: Don't you think TAR is obsolete?

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  1. #1
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    Don't you think TAR is obsolete?

    Well, it does the archiving job, but it takes very long time to just view the contents! That's not normal for an archiver, cause i have very large tars of my backups and i should wait for a couple of minutes to just view the contents and choose what i need to restore.

    Please, share your opinion about how this can be solved. Thanks.

    P.S. bz2 and gz are great, no questions to them.

  2. #2
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    Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

    Re: Don't you think TAR is obsolete?

    if its aint broken,dont fix it.
    I dont have any issues with tar files.

  3. #3
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    Re: Don't you think TAR is obsolete?

    I think you misunderstood me. I believe that the tar architecture was introduced long ago when everyone was using tapes for storage. Since that time, you should read the whole tar file to be able to view all its contents. Maybe i'm not right, but i'm looking for an answer.

  4. #4
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    Hardy Heron (Ubuntu Development)

    Re: Don't you think TAR is obsolete?

    tar does something entirely different than bz2 and gz, hence why they are used in combination.

    tar simply archives files, it does not compress them. Tar is used to take a whole bunch of files and stick them into one big file. After that is done the file is compressed using some compression algorithm, like bz2 or gz. So to say that tar is obsoleted because of bz2 or gz doesn't make much sense.

    Though that does beg the question, why can't we all just use .7z? It's open source, and it does both archiving and compression. I can't think of a reason off the top of my head, but maybe someone else on the forums can.

  5. #5
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    Hardy Heron (Ubuntu Development)

    Re: Don't you think TAR is obsolete?

    Oh, I found the answer.

    7z does not preserve the owner/group of the file like tar does. Guess that's why we still use tar!

    edit: And if you are looking for the reason why it takes so long to open a large .tar.bz2 or .tar.gz file, it's because (as my friend explained to me) the metadata is stored along with each file, and because tar is wrapped inside bzip2 or gzip, the metadata is compressed as well, and you have to decompress the whole archive to read the metadata or to read a single member, or whatever. He went on to contrast that to .zip, on the opposite end of the spectrum you have ZIP, which not only stores the metadata separately, it also compresses each file independently so you can read a single file out of a ZIP archive without having anything to do with the others. Just read the position and length out of the header, seek, and start decompressing But because every file is compressed independently, the compression ratio isn't as good as it could be

    I'm not smart enough to explain things, but he was
    Last edited by ASULutzy; May 6th, 2008 at 08:45 PM.

  6. #6
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    Re: Don't you think TAR is obsolete?

    ok, we have the reason. And noone is going to fix this, isn't he? Are we going to live with tape-like tar archives in the XXI century? Maybe the developers should just add an option to tar (which is almost used with -j or -z options for compression) to make this not to happen?

  7. #7
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    Hardy Heron (Ubuntu Development)

    Re: Don't you think TAR is obsolete?

    Perhaps the compression ratio is the driving factor here, where .tar.bz2 or .tar.gz wins out over .zip?

  8. #8
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    Re: Don't you think TAR is obsolete?

    maybe, but an ability to bypass that would be very handy. I don't really need very high compression ratios in my case, and if the resulting 1 GB file would be a couple of megs larger, but would open instantly i would be happy

  9. #9
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    Re: Don't you think TAR is obsolete?

    yes, sure, it does not do any compression, but i'm not talking about compression. Tar is great in all its functionality, but when you open a large tar file through the archive manager, you should wait till the system reads all the file to be able to look through the contents. Even in the obsolete zip you can view the contents quickly.

  10. #10
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    Re: Don't you think TAR is obsolete?

    Quote Originally Posted by descentspb View Post
    yes, sure, it does not do any compression, but i'm not talking about compression. Tar is great in all its functionality, but when you open a large tar file through the archive manager, you should wait till the system reads all the file to be able to look through the contents. Even in the obsolete zip you can view the contents quickly.
    You are asking the wrong question! When you have just a .gz or .bz2, it's a *single* file, compressed. When you have .tar.gz or .tar.bz2 or just .tar it's a bunch of files archived and *maybe* compressed (if .tar.gz or .tar.bz2). If file-roller is slow on uncompressed tars, that's file-roller's fault. It has *nothing* to do with tar's format.

    LinuxChix | Linux User #432169 | Ubuntu User #8495 | IRC: maco @ irc.linuxchix.org or irc.freenode.net

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