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

[Denis Excoffier]

On Fri, Jul 06, 2012 at 12:44:24PM +0200, Joerg Schilling wrote:
>> Tim Kientzle <address@hidden> 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.
>> 
>> 100 directory entries looks a bit small.
>> 
>> average values seem to be 5..50 entries per directory, 100 is a number that 
>> looks too close to values from every day.
>> 
>> But in general: as directories usually don't have too many entries, it is 
>> not a 
>> problem to read a directory at once (and this is why star uses this method 
>> since 10 years).

To be myself honest also, i have sometimes to deliver directories that
contain about 50000 files, that i would like sorted. In any case, i
prefer to rely on a single additional option on my tar command line (in
TAR_OPTIONS in this case) than on a complex and error-prone find
incantation. If not provided directly (as an option) or indirectly
(by just replacing 100 with 50000 in the code) by
tar, i feel myself capable to insert some dirty malloc/qsort/free
somewhere in tar/src/create.c, not far where --no-recursion is
actually acting.

Denis Excoffier.