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.