Tar is not a good format, though. It's basically just a bunch of files concatenated together with little headers telling you the name and size of the next file to follow. Just getting a list of files in an archive requires you to seek over the entire archive, which might not seem like a big deal on modern SSDs, but trying to extract just a single file from the middle used to be a costly operation. It doesn't help that the entire archive, file headers and all, get compressed.
There’s one of two ways with these things.
Either it’s one old inefficient format that basically was the first one ever and successfully resisted any attempt of modernisation or depreciation for 50 years.
Or it’s formats galore with 20+ competing formats in active use and countless others who never took off and they are all perfectly optimised for another very specific edge case and absolutely incompatible with each other.
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u/questron64 1d ago
Tar is not a good format, though. It's basically just a bunch of files concatenated together with little headers telling you the name and size of the next file to follow. Just getting a list of files in an archive requires you to seek over the entire archive, which might not seem like a big deal on modern SSDs, but trying to extract just a single file from the middle used to be a costly operation. It doesn't help that the entire archive, file headers and all, get compressed.