Hi, Richard Owlett wrote: > Compression "efficiency" [better term??] is not an issue as I'll be only be > dealing with a very small portion of the contents of XYZ.tar.xz .
The speed of decompression can become important if the tar archive is large. The archive is compressed as a whole. So the reading program has to decompress the archive from its start at least up to the end of the last desired file. Regardless of compression, tar is not very efficient when it comes to picking files from the archive. If the storage medium is slow, then it may last quite some time until the desired files are encountered while reading the archive from its start. Even if the archive is not compressed. That's why i switched away from tar and afio archives about 15 years ago. Have a nice day :) Thomas
