Please settle an argument for us: Did you know that TAR stood for Tape ARchive? To clarify, I believe many people know this, someone else believes few people know and I am just old.
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The real question is how many of us actually wrote a tar archive to tape in their career? (/me raises hand)
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Yes on knowing it stands for Tape ARchive. Yes to using them to actually write to tape (this week, in fact!) and also to write to them over 'rsh' on SGI IRIX back in the day :D
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Another trivia bit I feel like only the older folks know is 'tar -t' to look at the index of the tarfile and see if it has what you want before you spend hours un-tar-ing the whole thing
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Replying to @0xMatt @secureideas
The problem is that “tar -t” still has to read the entire archive. There is no ToC or index, just the headers on the individual file entries.

Oct 13, 2022 · 8:50 PM UTC

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Replying to @hal_pomeranz @secureideas
Hmm. It's been a long while, but I recall SGI tar writing an index at the beginning of the tape. Maybe we had special options we were using?
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