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Comment by baruch | Hacker News Reader

I usually use something like the following to do it:

find $DIR -type f | rev | sort | rev | tar -cv -T /dev/stdin -f $OUTPUT.tar

Add a -j or -z or any other compressor you want.

This will sort the files on reverse filename order so that similar sounding files will go together. It's not perfect and I had an idea to write something better but since it's usually enough I didn't really bother.

Only thing that is needed is a program that takes a list of files and sets them in order for tar to do the packing and gzip/bzip2 compress the hell out of the pre-ordered files.

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Thanks, I am aware of tricks like that, but it gets tiring really fast, so I don't use that in practice. Why can't they just add another flag to tar to call a program that would produce the ordering, just like they have compressor flags?

> Why can't they just add another flag to tar [...]?

You are "they" - you can add that flag. If it turns out that it works well, it'll (probably) be taken and added to whichever `tar` implementations you submit patches for.

Different people will want different sorts for different needs, you can already feed tar the list of sorted files so it only takes another program to provide the specific sorted order for you.

I actually do not really know why they bothered with the -z -j and such compression options when you could already pipe to a compressor of choice.

goodtar:

    #!/bin/bash

    find $3 type -f | rev | sort | rev | tar -cv $2 -T /dev/stdin -f $1

Now put `goodtar` in `/usr/bin`. Whenever you want to compress stuff, just say:

   goodtar -j output.tar mydir

What's making you tired?

I just created a quick hack which is essentially at this level but I would try to improve upon it, it can be found at:

https://github.com/baruch/sortedtar

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