NEW TAR

[Andrey Chernov]

On Mon, Jul 19, 2004 at 09:29:54PM -0700, Tim Kientzle wrote:
> but they're not gtar-compatible.  (The gtar
> approach has a number of drawbacks.  The primary
> one being that on many systems it requires reading
> the entire file twice, once to find holes and again
> to actually archive the file.  It is possible to
> do both in one pass if you store the sparse file
> data in a different fashion.)

I can't imagine the case when 2 passes are needed. Even if you have normal 
file in the archive and specify -S only when extracting (it should work as 
expected), only 1 pass is needed. Just stop on first '\0' and count them 
until they finished, then do lseek (real case will be a bit harder to 
implement because of block boundaries).

-- 
Andrey Chernov | http://ache.pp.ru/