Whoops, I replied to Tim directly a few days ago because I didn't realize that his question had gone out to the mailing list...
On 05/10/17 20:54, Jamie Landeg-Jones wrote: > Tim McCormack <[email protected]> wrote: >> I recently had occasion to restore a 700 kB file from several archives. >> The file was retrieved within seconds, but tarsnap continued to hold >> open a connection to something in Amazon EC2 (I assume the tarsnap >> service) for 8 to 9 minutes. What is it doing, and how can it be made >> faster, besides killing the process once I see the file is retrieved? > > There is nothing in the tar format stopping a file existing more than once, > and anywhere in the archive. Therefore to ensure complete compatibility > with tar, tarsnap has to go through the whole archive irrespective of > whether it's found a match or not. > > However, tarsnap does have the "-q" option to do what you want. [...] For the record, this is almost exactly the answer I gave. :-) The one thing I'd add is that the -q option will exit as soon as *at least one* archive entry has been extracted matching each pattern listed on the command line, so it's almost certainly not what you want if you're using wildcards. -- Colin Percival Security Officer Emeritus, FreeBSD | The power to serve Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid
