On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 9:08 AM, Arun Khan <knura9 at gmail.com> wrote: > On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 7:30 PM, Dotan Cohen <dotancohen at gmail.com> wrote: >> On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 15:54, Jerry Franz <jfranz at freerun.com> wrote: >>> tar is normally screaming fast unless you use bzip2 compression (or gzip >>> compression on an underpowered CPU). >>> >>> Provide details: What are you tarring, how are you invoking tar, what >>> hardware are you running on (hard drive types, cpu type, etc). >>> >> >> Thanks, Jerry, I was in fact using bzip2: >> $ tar -cjf dcl-2010-12-07.tbz dcl-2010-12-07/ > > bzip2 will slow down the operation. If you don't really need > compressed than simply do "tar cf <tar file> <dir/file list>" It would be interesting to see how compression would do if pushing across a slow link :). There are many times where I run across the OP's scenario, but often I need to push a tar across a relatively slow link. bzip is slower to compress, but may make up the difference in transfer time. Maybe time to fire up maxima and find that sweet spot :D