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

[Tim Kientzle]

On Jul 4, 2012, at 11:57 PM, Denis Excoffier wrote:
> 
> I understand that in the most general case, the memory requirements
> might be huge (or use temporary files like 'sort', or use 'sort'
> itself). But it has to be taken into account that someone who stores,
> say, 10000 files/subdirs in a single directory has probably the
> necessary amount of memory to perform 'ls' (with default arguments) on
> this directory, which also sorts the output.

Such people generally use "ls -f" a lot.

> For tar, --no-sort-directories would definitely be the default.

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.

Tim