It has an index at the end of the file, yeah, but once you've read that bit, you learn where the contents are located and if compression is disabled, you can e.g. memory map them.
With tar you need to scan the entire file start-to-finish before you know where the data is located, as it's literally a tape archiving format, designed for a storage medium with no random access reads.
It has an index at the end of the file, yeah, but once you've read that bit, you learn where the contents are located and if compression is disabled, you can e.g. memory map them.
With tar you need to scan the entire file start-to-finish before you know where the data is located, as it's literally a tape archiving format, designed for a storage medium with no random access reads.
Yes, but it's an O(1) random access seek rather than O(n) scanning seek