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I have never heard of pax.
8 points
And now you join the thousands of us who have heard of it but never have any use for it.
Had you heard of cpio? I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have heard of that either if it hadn’t been mentioned in a Unix book I bought in the 90s.
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I’d say pixz is considerably more interesting to improve tar.
Used as a compressor with tar, it adds:
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Parallel compression/decompression, increasingly important with many-core processors.
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Indexed access. Tarballs, unlike, say, zip or 7zip, don’t normally support jumping right to the point in an archive where a file lives.
It’s LZMA-based, like xz, lzip, or 7zip. Good-but-slow compression, faster decompression than bzip.