commit 02bfc818596e53ffa60716021f9ba728ca51d0be
parent 729ddd3b576fa0a6f6d64f346bdf78aea6dd9f09
Author: d-s <ds@voyager.local>
Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2023 17:19:48 +0200
feat: article for 2023-04-12
Diffstat:
1 file changed, 30 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
diff --git a/content/2023/tar-is-for-tape-drive.md b/content/2023/tar-is-for-tape-drive.md
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+---
+title: "Tar Is for Tape Drive"
+category: "software"
+abstract: Exploring IT history to understand current quirks
+date: 2023-04-12T17:17:07+02:00
+year: 2023
+draft: false
+tags:
+- tar
+- tarball
+- Unix
+- POSIX
+- computer-history
+---
+One of the things I never knew I wanted to know:
+
+> tar creates and manipulates streaming archive files.
+> (source: man tar(1))
+
+Tarball is a file standing for the drive:
+
+> A tar archive consists of a series of file objects, hence the popular term tarball, referencing how a tarball collects objects of all kinds that stick to its surface.
+> (source: [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarball_(computing)))
+
+This explains two things I never got about tar:
+- It's slow. The tarball represents a physical tape, so to get a file from it, tar must virtually forward it to the needed position.
+- It's not compressed, as otherwise, the computer would need to read the entire tape into memory, extract it and work on that.
+
+Tar is one of the things where computer archeology makes things clearer. Nowadays, we often forget that computers have a history and a lot of things we take for granted need to be invented. Many quirks can be understood if we explore the past a bit.
+
