<story><title>Pack: A new container format for compressed files</title><url>https://pack.ac/note/pack</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bno1</author><text>I found squashfs to be a great archive format. It preserves Linux file ownership and permissions, you can extract individual files without parsing the entire archive like tar and it&amp;#x27;s mountable. It&amp;#x27;s also openable in 7zip.&lt;p&gt;I wonder how pack compares to it, but its home page and github don&amp;#x27;t tell much.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lathiat</author><text>Yeah squashfs is one of the good ones right now.&lt;p&gt;for sosreports (archives with lots of diagnostic commands and logfiles from a linux host), I wanted to find a file format that can both used zstd compression (or maybe something else that is about as fast and compressible, currently often uses xz which is very very slow) -and- that lets you unpack a single file fast, with an index, ideally so you can mount it loopback or with fuse or otherwise just quickly unpack a single file in a many-GB archive.&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;d be surprised that this basically doesn&amp;#x27;t exist right now. Theres a bunch of half solutions, but no real good easily available one. Some things add indexes to tar, zstd does support partial&amp;#x2F;offset unpacking without reading the entire archive in the code but basically no one uses that function, it&amp;#x27;s kindof silly. There are zip and rar tools with zstd support, but they are not all cross compatible and mostly doesn&amp;#x27;t exist in the packaged Linux versions.&lt;p&gt;squashfs with zstd added mostly fits the bill.&lt;p&gt;I was really surprised not to find anything else given we had this in Zip and RAR files 2 decades ago. But nothing so far that would or could ship on a standard open source system managed to modernise that featureset.&lt;p&gt;(If anyone has any pointers let me know :-)</text></comment>
<story><title>Pack: A new container format for compressed files</title><url>https://pack.ac/note/pack</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>bno1</author><text>I found squashfs to be a great archive format. It preserves Linux file ownership and permissions, you can extract individual files without parsing the entire archive like tar and it&amp;#x27;s mountable. It&amp;#x27;s also openable in 7zip.&lt;p&gt;I wonder how pack compares to it, but its home page and github don&amp;#x27;t tell much.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toomuchtodo</author><text>Are you able to seek and selectively extract from squashfs archives using range headers if stored in object storage systems like S3?&lt;p&gt;Example: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;alexwlchan.net&amp;#x2F;2019&amp;#x2F;working-with-large-s3-objects&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;alexwlchan.net&amp;#x2F;2019&amp;#x2F;working-with-large-s3-objects&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>