Recently I've taken to the .xar format because its TOC at the start of the file allows for really fast extraction of specific files without having to read from the beginning, which works wonders with storing text corpuses. FileLocator Pro also has built-in indexing support for it, and they work really well together.
However, very few apps actually support creation of these archives. I ended up using libarchive's bsdtar for the task, though it took a very long time (not sure if that can be sped up at all).
I'd love to see ouch support this format, it's criminally underutilized in my opinion.
Recently I've taken to the
.xarformat because its TOC at the start of the file allows for really fast extraction of specific files without having to read from the beginning, which works wonders with storing text corpuses. FileLocator Pro also has built-in indexing support for it, and they work really well together.However, very few apps actually support creation of these archives. I ended up using libarchive's
bsdtarfor the task, though it took a very long time (not sure if that can be sped up at all).I'd love to see
ouchsupport this format, it's criminally underutilized in my opinion.