tar doesn’t even provide compression. Which may be what you want. If you have a weak CPU and a big storage device why would you waste the cpu cycles? I know I’ve removed the compression step in AUR builds for example. But if you don’t know what it does, maybe an all in one solution like 7zip or winrar might be a more attractive prospect.
The tar format doesn’t, but the tar command has command line flags for a number of compression algorithms, and if your algorithm of choice doesn’t have a flag, you can just pipe it to the compression program.
The pixz compressor provides parallized compression/decompression (desirable on modern CPUs), uses LZMA (like 7zip or xz), and provides indexed access when used as tar's compressor. The last of these is what you want.
I very rarely list the content of compressed files, so that doesn’t bother me much.
Back in the day the trick to get better compression on zip files was to first make an uncompressed zip file, and then put that in a compressed zip file. tar did that all by itself!
The only thing I’ve done with a GUI archiver for the past 20+ years is right click on a file and select “extract to here”. But more commonly I just extract things on the command line, without any automatic processing.
tar doesn’t even provide compression. Which may be what you want. If you have a weak CPU and a big storage device why would you waste the cpu cycles? I know I’ve removed the compression step in AUR builds for example. But if you don’t know what it does, maybe an all in one solution like 7zip or winrar might be a more attractive prospect.
The tar format doesn’t, but the
tarcommand has command line flags for a number of compression algorithms, and if your algorithm of choice doesn’t have a flag, you can just pipe it to the compression program.Compressed tars suck anyway since you need to decompress them in order to get the list of files inside, unlike in any other sane archive format.
The pixz compressor provides parallized compression/decompression (desirable on modern CPUs), uses LZMA (like 7zip or
xz), and provides indexed access when used astar'scompressor. The last of these is what you want.https://github.com/vasi/pixz
pixzis packaged in Debian-family distros.I very rarely list the content of compressed files, so that doesn’t bother me much.
Back in the day the trick to get better compression on zip files was to first make an uncompressed zip file, and then put that in a compressed zip file.
tardid that all by itself!I mean that’s what GUI archivers do when you open the file.
So tar is only useful for some kind of automatic workflows where archives are processed automatically. Like what package managers do.
The only thing I’ve done with a GUI archiver for the past 20+ years is right click on a file and select “extract to here”. But more commonly I just extract things on the command line, without any automatic processing.