• MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
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      20 hours ago

      Dumb and inefficient but simple enough to not care about your newfangled “security exploits”.

      • certified_expert@lemmy.world
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        17 hours ago

        Do you have any foundation for your claim?

        • tar paired with gzip or xz it is quite comparable in compression ratios. xz can be actually better than rar.
        • tar preserves file permissions.
        • tar lets you just pack files together with no compression at near instant speed
        • you can pipe it

        Dumb is a feature: do one thing and do it well. Inefficient? BS.

        Here a qick comparison

        • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
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          16 hours ago

          tar has no index for quick lookup, tar extracts in quadratic time, stuff like that. I mean, even zip can extract a 1 MB file in a second from a 5 GB archive, tar needs to extract the whole thing.
          No “magic byte” either, making life hard for mime-tooling.

          To be fair, it was made for tape backups.

          • tar lets you just pack files together with no compression at near instant speed

          cat does so too. Add a index with metadata and a separator bit between the files and you almost have a tar but better in some areas.

          • certified_expert@lemmy.world
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            16 hours ago

            “tar extracts in quadratic time, stuff like that”. Is that what your favorite clanker told you? If that’s the case, why is uncompressed tar almost instant in practice when others take many seconds? Or compressed tars in the same time neighborhood than any other tool?

            Who does “quick lookups” in an arcived file? At most a content listing and then parse/grep whatever you want.

            About cat: Sure bud, but go and reconstruct a folder after you cated it.