Re: [Bug-tar] Solution to updating compressed archives: Pre-compress files

[Tim Kientzle]

On Oct 29, 2011, at 10:04 AM, Carl Eklof wrote:

> Problem:
> I frequently run into situations where I need to update archives. I of course 
> also want to conserve space so I use compression. These two desires are not 
> directly supported in the current version of tar. 
> 
> Solution:
> The solution requires two parts of the code to be modified:
>  1) Compress each file before adding it to the archive.
>  2) Upgrade the tar section of meta about each file in the archive to provide 
> storage space for specifying what compression algorithm/program is used for 
> that file (if any).

Why do you need "tar" to do this?

"zip" does exactly what you describe, and newer Info-Zip versions do a good job 
of preserving Unix permissions, timestamps, etc.

Tim