Re: [aclug-L] loopback Q.

[John Goerzen <jgoerzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Nov 11, 1998 at 11:55:04PM -0600, Brian J. Chapman wrote:

> okay, this might be a dumb question, but is it possible to loopback mount
> a TAR file?

Nope.  A tar file is not a filesystem (just as a zip file isn't either), so
it cannot be mounted as one.  One of the big hindrances to this is that tar
files do not contain any sort of central directory structure, which could
make it necessary to read through the entire archive each time an "ls" is
issued.  (Imagine doing that with a 70 MB file.)  The reason for this dates
back to the creation of tar; it was originally intended for doing backups to
tape (Tape ARchive).  When you do backups, you do not know beforehand which
files will actually be stored (the files may change after the backups start
if it's an active system), so it was not possible to put a central directory
there.  Also, the tapes of the day had no "seek" operation, so it would not
have gained them anything anyway.

Fortunately for us, GNU tar has pretty powerful extraction options :-)


-- 
John Goerzen   Linux, Unix consulting & programming   jgoerzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx |
Developer, Debian GNU/Linux (Free powerful OS upgrade)       www.debian.org |
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