On Oct 29, 2011, at 10:04 AM, Carl Eklof wrote: > Problem: > I frequently run into situations where I need to update archives. I of course > also want to conserve space so I use compression. These two desires are not > directly supported in the current version of tar. > > Solution: > The solution requires two parts of the code to be modified: > 1) Compress each file before adding it to the archive. > 2) Upgrade the tar section of meta about each file in the archive to provide > storage space for specifying what compression algorithm/program is used for > that file (if any).
Why do you need "tar" to do this? "zip" does exactly what you describe, and newer Info-Zip versions do a good job of preserving Unix permissions, timestamps, etc. Tim
