Subj : tar.gz files
To   : Russ Johnson
From : Thomas W. Mueller
Date : Sat Jun 30 2001 04:24 am

Hello Russ.

28 Jun 01 17:03, you wrote to Maurice Kinal:

 RJ> I just had a discussion with the author of bbbs. According to him, the
 RJ> reason you can't use tar.gz as an echomail archiver is because it
 RJ> can't append to an archive. This makes sense, since tar is used for
 RJ> writing to tape.
That's not quite correct. tar.gz is actually created by two programs, tar and 
gzip. tar could be used for echomail, but it would be pretty pointless, since 
it does not compress at all. That's what it calls gzip for if you call tar with 
the -z parameter. The resulting tar.gz file can indeed not be appended to 
without first un-gzip-in it, appending and then gzip-ing it. Which would of 
course be an option.

But there is another possibility: AFAIR you can call tar with a parameter to 
compress individual files rather than the whole archive. This results in a bit 
less compression but the archives it creates this way can easily be extended.

And one last option: You could just use tar and call gzip just before you 
transfer the file or even just pipe it through gzip when you read it from the 
disk for transferring.

Thomas

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