Dale R. Worley wor...@alum.mit.edu wrote: > I missed those facts. I only skimmed the section of > http://www.nongnu.org/zutils/manual/zutils_manual.html about Zcat and > hadn't read the "Common options" section which makes those clear. I'll > have to remember that zcat has this nice functionality. > > I'm not interested enough in this to implement it, but I'll leave this > one note for anyone who is researching the possibility: You might be > concerned that starting a e.g. zcat process for every file to scan would > be excessively high overhead. But many years ago, I modified "tar" to > be able to compress each file individually (rather than the entire > archive collectively). Each file was processed by a separate gzip > process, and in my usage written to an Exabyte tape. I was worried that > all these process invocations would slow down the backup, but even on a > low-speed 486, the processes were insignificant. So I never improved > the implementation to use an internal compression library. Apparently > once all the needed files are in the buffers, creating yet another > process from them is quick. > > Dale
I already have a patch that I believe is trivial enough to not cause copyright concerns, would you like me to send it?
