In my thesis, I'm working on a project that produces huge amounts of output in text files - about 25-30GB spread across a million or more files per simulation run. If I compress the files using e.g. `tar --xz --create -f archive.tar.gz tracefiles/` I can reduce the size on disk by a factor 5-6 or even more. I postprocess all this data in Julia, and reading the data files seems to be a major bottleneck.
Has any effort been made toward reading files in these formats in Julia? I've seen [ZipFile](https://github.com/fhs/ZipFile.jl) for handling the .zip format, but unfortunately `zip` isn't available on our cluster, while `tar` is. If there hasn't been any work on this, I might take a stab at it sometime - but first I must finish my thesis... // T
