Hello, I recently had problems with an (uncompressed) tar file because about 8 MB on the CD had turned unreadable. Thus tar (and even other programs) saw just the first 290 MB of a 620 MB file.
(I "solved" the problem by copying the first 290 and the last 320 MB of the file together to a new, smaller one.) I suggest the feature that tar can extract all administrative information from a tar file (everything that is not file data plus a checksum for each file if that's not included today) and store that in a seperate file. That file should not be large, maybe 5% of the original one. In case of a partly destroyed file it would be possible to extract most files (and to determine which are correct). I should talk to the compression guys about that but it might even be possible to recover damaged compressed files (gzip at all and bzip2 with less loss) as certain data in the original file would be known. These files might even be used for a much faster display of the content and faster extraction of certain files. Best regards, Hauke Laging
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