Package: tar Version: 1.22-1 Severity: normal When running "tar tf" or "tar xf" on a large tarball containing few large files, which is stored on a slow disk, GNU tar becomes incredibly slow.
The reason is: GNU tar doesn't lseek() to the offset where the next file would start, but rather read()s through the file contents and throws them away. Busybox tar and libarchive's tar don't show this behavior and call lseek() instead, which greatly speeds tar up (either while listing files, or when only extracting parts of the archive). This happens on all recent versions of GNU tar on all systems. -- System Information: Debian Release: squeeze/sid APT prefers unstable APT policy: (500, 'unstable') Architecture: i386 (i686) Kernel: Linux 2.6.29-2-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core) Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Versions of packages tar depends on: ii libc6 2.9-12 GNU C Library: Shared libraries tar recommends no packages. Versions of packages tar suggests: ii bzip2 1.0.5-1 high-quality block-sorting file co pn ncompress <none> (no description available) -- no debconf information -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
