A deep dive into the tar format

I'd say pixz is considerably more interesting to improve tar.

https://github.com/vasi/pixz

Used as a compressor with tar, it adds:

• Parallel compression/decompression, increasingly important with many-core processors.

• Indexed access. Tarballs, unlike, say, zip or 7zip, don't normally support jumping right to the point in an archive where a file lives.

It's LZMA-based, like xz, lzip, or 7zip. Good-but-slow compression, faster decompression than bzip.

And now you join the thousands of us who have heard of it but never have any use for it.

Had you heard of cpio? I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have heard of that either if it hadn't been mentioned in a Unix book I bought in the 90s.

Thank you!