Re: [Bug-tar] make your tar archive even more anonymous

[Tim Kientzle]

On Jul 5, 2012, at 8:52 AM, Denis Excoffier wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 05, 2012 at 08:19:51AM -0700, Tim Kientzle wrote:
>>> 
>>> To be honest, I've considered altering bsdtar's directory-traversal
>>> code so that it always sorts the first 100 names in a directory
>>> and then leaves the rest unsorted.  That would give fully-sorted
>>> output for almost all cases and avoid the memory consumption
>>> (and slow performance) on very large directories.
>>> 
> Great! Do you mean something like
> --sort-first-directory-entries=n (with default 100, and
> possibly "unlimited"), default default being
> --sort-first-directory-entries=0 if --sort-first-directory-entries
> is not specified
> 
> or
> 
> --sort-directory / --no-sort-directory
> with 100 not settable on the command line, and an array of
> 100*(PATH_MAX+1) statically allocated in the code?
> 
> I would prefer to avoid the second one of course because i'd like
> to be able to easily raise 100 if needed (recompilation is okay).

Were I to implement such a feature at all, I
would rather not provide any options at all.

> In addition, "always" sorting is IMHO bad idea for people used
> to get their 10000 files in directory order since ages.

Who?  Directory order is a very bad thing to rely
on, especially with a proliferation of new file systems
that use widely varying notions of "directory order."

Tim