[ILUG] alternative to tar

[Fergal Daly]

Can anyone recommend and alternative to tar? Because as far as I can tell 
with tar, you have to read the whole tar file to get to the last file. Is 
there a tarrer that builds some sort of table of contents, puts that at the 
start of the file and lets you jump in and extract files at random, 
preferably with compression too.

I'd imagine zip might do this, but it's not really designed to handle 
permissions etc.

Fergal