Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!killer!mjbtn!root
From: root@mjbtn.UUCP (Mark J. Bailey)
Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d
Subject: Re: A Dumb Idea
Summary: Yes you can make selective extraction from compressed tar files!
Message-ID: <278@mjbtn.UUCP>
Date: 18 Aug 88 17:33:19 GMT
References: <17362@gatech.edu> <2713@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu>
Organization: JobSoft Design & Development, Murfreesboro, TN
Lines: 28

In article <2713@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu>, cck@deneb.ucdavis.edu (Earl H. Kinmonth) writes:
> >
> >	What exactly is it that people have against compressed tar files?
> >
> You cannot make a selective extraction from a compressed tar file
> without decompressing the whole thing. With many small files, tar adds
> a fair amount of garbage to pad out blocks.

I hate to disagree with you here, but at least on Unix, I use the following
method for selective extractions, and it works:

uncompress