Using shell commands versus C equivalents

[Tim Kientzle]

>> I spent a lot of time recently in libarchive/bsdtar optimizing
>> the disk handling; I can share lots of ideas for improving
>> performance of disk-bound operations like this. 

One thing you might find useful:  libarchive has an
API for "creating things on disk," which handles a lot
of trivia (creating parent directories transparently,
restoring permissions, users, file flags, etc.).

It is, of course, especially useful if you're pulling
things out of tar archives, but can be used separately
from that.  Since libarchive is a standard part of
FreeBSD, you should feel free to use it.

Tim K