[ILUG] alternative to tar

[Niall O Broin]

On Tue, Jun 20, 2000 at 05:59:15PM +0100, Fergal Daly wrote:
> 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.

If the archive is on a tape, then you must read to the end to get the last
file due to the nature of tape. If it's an archive on a disk, then the seek
time is negligible.

> 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.

That's what dump (and its companion restore) does. You can't really extract
files at random - you get a browsing interface from which you select files
to restore, and then restore them all. But again, if the dump archive is on
a tape, you have to read to the end to get the last file. In principle you
can use dump to stdout and pipe it through a compression program, though
I've never done that, and I don't know how it would work when dumping
gigabytes of data.

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

Zip does handle permissions, and ownerships too with the right switch.
However, I think it can only ouput to files, not devices. What exactly are
you trying to do ?



Regards,



Niall