It's currently possible to create tar.gz and tar.xz archives by calling directly tar with the correct arguments.
For example : tar -czf will create a tar.gz archive. It's also possible to combine tar with other processing utilities, such as : tar -c [files] | gzip > archive.tar.gz That's the way I'm currently using tar, in combination with lz4. lz4 is a new compression algorithm, recently added into Linux kernel. It's very fast, putting minimal pressure on CPU. It also features a High Compression variant (lz4hc) able to squeeze data at almost gzip level while retaining decompression speed. Since the release of Linux 3.11, the maintainer also provided a command line utility (lz4), with gzip-compatible arguments. (http://code.google.com/p/lz4/) It makes it easier for me to reuse existing scripts. The utility is a pure stream compressor, meaning it has no archiving capability, and rely entirely on tar to do this job. Any file operation with lz4 must be done with tar, to keep names, attributes, directory structure, etc. Considering that lz4 seems fully compatible with gzip, would it be possible to add lz4 to the list of available compressors within the tar command line ? (or is it planned ?) Regards
