Re: NEW TAR

On Thu, 2004-Jul-22 11:19:29 +0400, Andrey Chernov wrote:
>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).

I thought gnutar implemented sparse files by writing a bitmap of used
blocks vs holes followed by the actual data.  This needs 1 pass to
calculate the bitmap and a second pass to write the data.  You probably
don't want to unnecessarily convert holes to data in your archive.
Some Un*x systems generate a core dump by writing the process memory
map to a file - holes and all - giving you a sparse file that appears
to be several GB in size.  Older dbm variants also tended to leave
large holes in the .pag file from memory.

-- 
Peter Jeremy