Testing Tar (was Re: bad news for bsdtar..)

[Tim Kientzle]

Don Lewis wrote:
> On 23 Apr, Tim Kientzle wrote:
>>Bruce Evans wrote:
>>
>>>At least the -current version of tar skips reading the
>>>data when it is writing to /dev/null.
>>
>>I wonder why it does that?
> 
> This speeds up Amanda quite a bit.  Amanda will run tar with the
> --totals option ...  to plan the best mixture of full and incremental
> backups.

Hmmm... How accurate does such information need to be?

Getting accurate estimates out of bsdtar could be tricky.
(Either bsdtar needs to know a lot more about archive formats
than it does right now, or libarchive needs to have a way
to export this kind of information.)

Tim