Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!uwmcsd1!ig!agate!ucbvax!ucdavis!deneb.ucdavis.edu!cck
From: cck@deneb.ucdavis.edu (Earl H. Kinmonth)
Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d
Subject: Re: A Dumb Idea
Message-ID: <2713@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu>
Date: 12 Aug 88 21:53:00 GMT
References: <17362@gatech.edu>
Sender: uucp@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu
Reply-To: cck@deneb.ucdavis.edu.UUCP (Earl H. Kinmonth)
Organization: University of California, Davis
Lines: 14

In article <17362@gatech.edu> jkg@gatech.UUCP (Jim Greenlee) writes:
>In reading the discussion about ARC vs. PK{ARC|PAK} vs. ZOO, a thought occurred
>to me that I have never seen addressed in this newsgroup:
>
>	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.

cpio could be used for the same purpose without the garbage.

cpio and tar are not that readily available for MSDOS although versions
of both do exist.