Re: Tarsnap hangs for 8-9 minutes after restoring one file

[Colin Percival <cperciva@tarsnap.com>]

Whoops, I replied to Tim directly a few days ago because I didn't realize
that his question had gone out to the mailing list...

On 05/10/17 20:54, Jamie Landeg-Jones wrote:
> Tim McCormack <cortex@brainonfire.net> wrote:
>> I recently had occasion to restore a 700 kB file from several archives.
>> The file was retrieved within seconds, but tarsnap continued to hold
>> open a connection to something in Amazon EC2 (I assume the tarsnap
>> service) for 8 to 9 minutes. What is it doing, and how can it be made
>> faster, besides killing the process once I see the file is retrieved?
> 
> There is nothing in the tar format stopping a file existing more than once,
> and anywhere in the archive. Therefore to ensure complete compatibility
> with tar, tarsnap has to go through the whole archive irrespective of
> whether it's found a match or not.
> 
> However, tarsnap does have the "-q" option to do what you want. [...]

For the record, this is almost exactly the answer I gave. :-)

The one thing I'd add is that the -q option will exit as soon as *at least
one* archive entry has been extracted matching each pattern listed on the
command line, so it's almost certainly not what you want if you're using
wildcards.

-- 
Colin Percival
Security Officer Emeritus, FreeBSD | The power to serve
Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid