Re: What are best lzip compression options for large game tar archives?

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

Hoël Bézier wrote:
> Thanks for these advices. Browsing your website I encountered the tarlz
> software. Any particular reason you didn't recommended it?

I think I gave for granted that you just wanted to know about compressor 
options and limited myself to answer your question. I only thought about 
tarlz after sending my response.

Of course you may use tarlz. I myself have been using it for years to create 
the tarballs of all my projects, and the distribution Dragora GNU/Linux uses 
it to create its packages. It even produces more portable archives than 
those produced by GNU tar by default.

> > or with a recent version of GNU tar you can use
> >
> > tar -cf foo.tar.lz -I 'plzip -0' foo
>
> Would you happen to know precisely what "recent version" here means? As
> we try to support all kind of setups, we might not use this option, or
> do a version check before using it.

From the NEWS file http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/tar.git/tree/NEWS it 
seems that the -I option accepts arguments since version 1.27 of GNU tar:

version 1.27 - Sergey Poznyakoff, 2013-10-05
[...]
Any option taking a command name as its argument now accepts a full
command line as well.  Thus, it is now possible to pass additional
arguments to invoked programs.  The affected options are:

  --checkpoint-action=exec
  -I, --use-compress-program
  -F, --info-script
  --to-command

Furthermore, if any additional information is supplied to such a
command via environment variables, these variables can now be used in
the command line itself.  Care should be taken to escape them, to
prevent from being expanded too early, for example:

  tar -x -f a.tar --info-script='changevol $TAR_ARCHIVE $TAR_VOLUME'


Best regards,
Antonio.