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I have a tar ball that has a huge number of very large files. The blocking factor is 10k. This is taking too long to extract because it does a lot of 10k writes. The filesystem will perform better if I get larger writes in one shot. If tar cannot let me do larger writes, how do I use some other bash piping technique to extract to memory and flush larger blocks to disk?

steve landiss
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  • The blocking factor != block size! You ask for the blocking factor, not the block size. The block size is always 512 bytes. – DaBler Nov 02 '18 at 14:24

1 Answers1

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I believe you're looking for the -b switch of tar:

 -b, --blocking-factor BLOCKS
       BLOCKS x 512 bytes per record

Now your command will look like this:

tar xfv mybigbigtar.tar --blocking-factor=<whatever you desire>

13dimitar
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