Hacker News Reader

That's exactly what they do - they explicitly call out this format as replacement to tar and zip at least:

> Most popular solutions like Zip, gzip, tar, RAR, or 7-Zip are near or more than three decades old. While holding value for such a long time (in the computer world) is testimony to their greatness, the work is far from done.

> Pack tries to continue this path as the next step and proposes the next universal choice in the field.

View on HN

Oh, for some reason I thought they promote it as archival container for situations with a lot of files.

Yes, I am. Pack can hold millions of files with no problem. One field in which it shines is that, aside from being fast at processing large amounts of data, it can process many small files much faster than similar tools or even many popular file systems.

About piping, it can be done, and it is on my list. I will finish features based on their popularity and making sense.

As Pack has random access support, you can choose a file in a big pack, and it can stream it out to the output. It is already able to unpack partially to your file system (using --include="file path in pack"); streaming/piping it would not be a problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com