New archive file format (was: [omgps] collect feature requests)

[Alexander Shulgin]

On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 00:20, Laszlo
KREKACS<laszlo.krekacs.list at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I dont want to compress at all. The 118MB for me is perfect. I only
>> want to pack the directory into a file. But not compressing.
>> Im thinking about tar or ar.
>
> Tar completely fail at random access, simply it lacks the
> table of content, so accessing the last file in the archive
> requires reading the whole content before it.

I fail to see how is this true for normal tar files (vs. data read
from pipe).  Can you elaborate please?

> Zip support accessing each files in the archive, although
> it compress the file by default.

Pardon my ignorance, but wouldn't zip -0 do the trick for your purpose? :)

--
Regards,
Alex