Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mit-eddie!fenchurch!jbs
From: jbs@fenchurch.mit.edu (Jeff Siegal)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: GNU-tar vs dump(1)
Message-ID: <10763@eddie.MIT.EDU>
Date: 3 Jan 89 23:51:48 GMT
References: <18008@adm.BRL.MIL>
Sender: uucp@eddie.MIT.EDU
Reply-To: jbs@fenchurch.UUCP (Jeff Siegal)
Organization: MIT, EE/CS Computer Facilities, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 13

In article <18008@adm.BRL.MIL> Rudy.Nedved@rudy.fac.cs.cmu.edu writes:
>Problem 1: tar does not deal with empty data blocks in a file. 
>[...]This can be partially solved by having tar read the
>blocked or raw disk device file but that means it must be system dependent.

You can just have tar -x look at the file data from the archive, and
if it contains a string of NULs, have it avoid writing the nulls to
the extracted file (using fseek to skip the appropriate number of
bytes).

This *might* even make it execute faster (I would guess not, though).

Jeff Siegal