GNU-tar vs dump(1)

[Jeff Siegal]

In article <18008 at adm.BRL.MIL> Rudy.Nedved at 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