[Bug-tar] tar semi-bug

[Andrew Somerville]

Hey,

        I noticed that finding listing the contents of a tar archive seems to take unnecessarily long when given a particular entry to test/list. I have a tar file which is fairly long, but has a very small file first in the tar. The file is named /path/bla/bla/disk.geometry. When I "tar -f myarchive.tar -t /path/bla/bla/disk.geometry", tar takes upwards of 30 secs to exit after finding and printing that disk.geometry was infact there. It doesnt seem to make sense to continue searching through the archive for a file once it has been found since any argument you can give to -t can occur at most once in the archive. If this is what is happening, it seems that the performance could be significantly improved if it was ajusted to stop searching after finding the target, and needless waiting for interactive scripts which use tar to gather information would be eliminated.

        When I get a chance I will take a look and see if there is an easy adjustment to fix this, and then submit the patch, but I may not get to it for a while, or at all.

        Just a heads up,
        Andrew Somerville