Hello, I was wondering whether it would be difficult or not, to add functionality to plzip, or create a variant of it, which had tarball indexing capabilities like pixz.
https://github.com/vasi/pixz Pixz allows a more random access to the compressed tarball. Listing is very quick, and even extracting a file at the end of a large tarball is quite fast, not too much slower than extracting it from an uncompressed, indexed tarball. A major advantage when extracting select files from an archived compressed tarball. The problem with using tar with compression is that you must decompress the stream until you reach the file you want to extract, if you only want to extract one or a few files. You must decompress the entire stream to list. Pixz solves this, and I think plzip could do this in a similar manner. Plzip could detect when it's compressing a tar file, and note which file within the tarball goes into which compressed member(s). When extracting specific files, it would only decompress the members those files are in and filter to stdout only the relevant tar data, which is then piped to tar for extraction. The relevant metadata would be appended to the end of the .lz file. I haven't looked into the source code in detail yet, I just wanted to know whether this reasoning was sound. Regards, Dennis _______________________________________________ Lzip-bug mailing list [email protected] https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lzip-bug
