Hi Paul,
> Presumably an option could be added to 'tar' so that it assumes the
> tar file contains no duplicates, and can run faster in your case.
FWIW, such an option already exists:
--occurrence[=NUMBER] process only the NUMBERth occurrence of each file
in the archive; this option is valid only in
conjunction with one of the subcommands --delete,
--diff, --extract or --list and when a list of
files is given either on the command line or via
the -T option; NUMBER defaults to 1
Perhaps the description is a bit vague, but it will make tar stop after
processing NUMBER occurrencies, which should presumably help in this case.
Regards,
Sergey
