Hop: Faster than unzip and tar at reading individual files

Re:Hop: Faster than unzip and tar at reading individual files by thayne on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @08:40PM (#29183462)

> When you produce a compressed tar file, the contents are written into a tar file, and this tar file as a whole is compressed.

I don't think that's quite how it works. I'm pretty sure it's more similar to doing something like `tar ... | gzip > output.tgz`. That is it streams the tar output through gzip before writing to the file. In fact with GNU tar at least you can use a `-I` option to use an arbitrary program to compress.

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Re:Hop: Faster than unzip and tar at reading individual files by codetrotter on Wednesday November 10, 2021 @08:41PM (#29183473)

Yeah I formulated it simplistically to not make the comment too long. But I didn't mean to imply that a tar file is actually created on disk or anything like that before compression happens.

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