• @[email protected]
      8•1 year ago

      Nothing, but I’ve read people who act as if tar files are some sort of alien artifact ready to rip their faces off.

  • @[email protected]English
    2•1 year ago

    Compatibility aside, I’d say that .tar.pxz aka .tpxz is probably my vote.

    LZMA is probably what I’d want to use. xz and 7zip use that. It’s a bit slow to compress, but it has good compression ratios, and it’s faster to decompress than bzip2.

    pixz permits for parallel LZMA compression/decompression. On present-day processors with a lot of cores, that’s desirable.

    https://github.com/vasi/pixz

    It also can use .tar as its container format, which is desirable; that’s everywhere.

    The major drawback to .tar is that it doesn’t support indexed access, so extracting a single file isn’t fast, but .tar.pxz does.

  • @[email protected]
    39•1 year ago

    When I’m feeling cool and downloading a *.tar* file, I’ll wget to stdout, and tar from stdin. Archive gets extracted on the fly.

    I have (successfully!) written an .iso to CD this way, too (pipe wget to cdrecord). Fun stuff.

  • @[email protected]English
    11•1 year ago

    If you download and extract the tarball as two separate steps instead of piping curl directly into tar xz (for gzip) / tar xj (for bz2) / tar xJ (for xz), are you even a Linux user?

    • @[email protected]
      2•1 year ago

      the problem is if the connection gets interrupted your progress is gone. you download to a file first and it gets interrupted, you just resume the download later

      • @[email protected]English
        4•1 year ago

        They really, really aren’t. Let’s take a look at this command together:

        curl -L [some url goes here] | tar -xz

        Sorry the formatting’s a bit messy, Lemmy’s not having a good day today

        This command will start to extract the tar file while it is being downloaded, saving both time (since you don’t have to wait for the entire file to finish downloading before you start the extraction) and disk space (since you don’t have to store the .tar file on disk, even temporarily).

        Let’s break down what these scary-looking command line flags do. They aren’t so scary once you get used to them, though. We’re not scared of the command line. What are we, Windows users?

        • curl -L – tells curl to follow 3XX redirects (which it does not do by default – if the URL you paste into cURL is a URL that redirects (GitHub release links famously do), and you don’t specify -L, it’ll spit out the HTML of the redirect page, which browsers never normally show)
        • tar -x – eXtract the tar file (other tar “command” flags, of which you must specify exactly one, include -c for Creating a tar file, and -t for Testing a tar file (i.e. listing all of the filenames in it and making sure their checksums are okay))
        • tar -z – tells tar that its input is gzip compressed (the default is not compressed at all, which with tar is an option) – you can also use -j for bzip2 and -J for xz
        • tar -f which you may be familiar with but which we don’t use here – -f tells tar which file you want it to read from (or write to, if you’re creating a file). tar -xf somefile.tar will extract from somefile.tar. If you don’t specify -f at all, as we do here, tar will default to reading the file from stdin (or writing a tar file to stdout if you told it to create). tar -xf somefile.tar (or tar -xzf somefile.tar.gz if your file is gzipped) is exactly equivalent to cat somefile.tar.gz | tar -xz (or tar -xz < somefile.tar – why use cat to do something your shell has built-in?)
        • tar -v which you may be familiar with but which we don’t use here – tells tar to print each filename as it extracts the file. If you want to do this, you can, but I’d recommend telling curl to shut up so it doesn’t mess up the terminal trying to show download progress also: curl -L --silent [your URL] | tar -xvz (or -xzv, tar doesn’t care about the order)

        You may have noticed also that in the first command I showed, I didn’t put a - in front of the arguments to tar. This is because the tar command is so old that it takes its arguments BSD style, and will interpret its first argument as a set of flags regardless of whether there’s a dash in front of them or not. tar -xz and tar xz are exactly equivalent. tar does not care.

        • @[email protected]
          3•1 year ago

          Thanks for the explanation, I might use more pipes now. Is it correct, that tar will restore the files in the tarball in the current directory?

          • @[email protected]English
            1•1 year ago

            Yes. You can specify tar -C somedir if you want it to extract them somewhere else.

            As a rule of thumb, I always extract my tarballs in a newly created, empty directory, just in case whoever packed it didn’t put all its files in a subdir

  • @[email protected]
    21•1 year ago

    I’m the weird one in the room. I’ve been using 7z for the last 10-15 years and now .tar.zst, after finding out that ZStandard achieves higher compression than 7-Zip, even with 7-Zip in “best” mode, LZMA version 1, huge dictionary sizes and whatnot.

    zstd --ultra -M99000 -22 files.tar -o files.tar.zst

  • cally [he/they]Nederlands
    6•1 year ago

    i just use either zip or tar+gzip. personally, i avoid rar as it’s a proprietary format.