Re: [Bug-tar] compressed archives within tar files

[Pavel Raiskup]

Hello,

On Saturday, March 15, 2014 09:13:08 e-letter wrote:
> Readers,
>
> What is the risk of data corruption if a zip archive is added to a tarball?
>
> If there is in-sufficient space on the local disk that contains the
> zip archive, can the zip file be extracted and 'piped' to the tarball
> on the storage disk (accessible via USB connection to the local disk)?

No IMO, you may not pipe the product of extraction (files, directories
..).  I am not sure I understand your use case correctly.  You basically
want convert Zip-standard archive to tar/pax?  I am not aware of any
converter like this.  Still, I don't see any risk of data corruption
(until your tools are not buggy and we accept that some attributes may be
lost) when you do this in two steps:

  * Firstly unzip the file into your USB disk and
  * then archive the resulting files into tarball

Both actions taking into account that your source drive is full.  Of
course, you'll need most probably more then twice as much space as the
archive occupies on the target USB disk.

Pavel