Re: multiply files in one (was GNU/Linux stance by Richard Stallman)

David Luyer (luyer@ucs.uwa.edu.au)
Tue, 30 Mar 1999 16:44:30 +0800

Harvey J. Stein wrote:
> Larry McVoy <lm@bitmover.com> writes:
>
> > I wouldn't bother to compress - just putting all the files into a
> > ``tarball'' will compress them quite nicely because of the lack of
> > fragmentation. Compression isn't the point, disk access / file
> > read is the point. For a large group of small files I want 2 disk
> > accesses (inode + tarball) for all files, instead of 2/file.
>
> How's that? First of all, tar pads out each file according to the
> blocking factor, and secondly, tar has a rather verbose header in
> front of each file.

I believe Larry is talking about tar as a concept, rather than an
implementation (from earlier posts). Basically 'an archiver, such as tar'.

Also, consider 'tar b 1' is a valid use of tar (the option b specifies the
blocking factor in 512 byte blocks, default is 20). Even if you were
compressing, if you were actually using tar as the file format, you'd probably
want --block-compress (block the output of compression program for tape use)
to hopefully avoid some fragmentation horror from a completely non-blocked
format.

David.

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