How do I pass pbzip2 -parms to tar?

[SlowJet]

I saw a new compile of pbzip2 on koji and it remined me to check it out.
(It is a paralell threaded bzip2. The kernel's arre now all smp, use tar.bz2 to reduce space on disk.

The pbzip2 has some parms that would reduce the intesity of the compress a bit and save some memory.
But I do not know how to include those -parms in tar.

old tar -cj mean compress with bzip2, ext bz2 means the file is compressed
#tar -cj -f filetocompresson.bz2 ...

new tar (remove j, use -I pbzip2 "want pbzip2 <parmes here> -f file
#tar -c -I "pbzip2 -m4 -b4 -p2" -f file ...

The question is:
Can it be quoted as shown somehow to include it's -parms?

The default used all the memory but a few MB of the 3.9GB after system of about 500MB.
The 4.9GB root took 32 min on a Pent IV, vs. about 47 min with bzip2 and got about the same compresstion size(1.4GB)
I would like to speed it up a few more minutes and use a litte more disk space.

Also could some try this on a qud intel in 32 bit, it you have one?
Your compession default rate s/b in the range of 7 to 12 MB/s.for 4 to 5GB input with a result of around 1.5GB output. But the default will require 4x900MB + 900MB + a few MB for the programs tar and pbzip.

I could not find any config file for pbzip2, nor were the examples practical for recovery.
The Man page says -I=pbzip2 but the = sign crashes the child thread.

SJ

---------- Post added at 12:33 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:42 AM ----------

Well, I googled and read and tried the quoted bit
but it did not work. Also I was confusing some KB's for MB's,
So I'll live with the defaults for now.

SJ

---------- Post added at 12:38 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:33 PM ----------

On second thoht, I can't use it inside tar because I need a -d parm to unzip it.
Back tot bzip2.
SJ

[george_toolan]

The kernels are SMP now, but do you have a dual core Pentium 4 or at least one with hyper-threading?

Btw what about xz compression or 7z?

[Gareth Jones]

You could do it the old-fashioned way:

tar cf - DIRECTORY | pbzip2 -YOUR_ARGS > ARCHIVE.tar.bz2
pbzcat ARCHIVE.tar.bz2 | tar xf -

(I'm assuming that pbzip2 interprets its command-line similarly to the original bzip2.)

[stevea]

Originally Posted by SlowJet

new tar (remove j, use -I pbzip2 "want pbzip2 <parmes here> -f file
#tar -c -I "pbzip2 -m4 -b4 -p2" -f file ...

The question is:
Can it be quoted as shown somehow to include it's -parms?

No.

I could not find any config file for pbzip2, nor were the examples practical for recovery.
The Man page says -I=pbzip2 but the = sign crashes the child thread.

The syntax is like
tar -I pbzip2 -cvf foo.tpz ./some/files
tar -I pbzip2 -tvf foo.tpz
tar -I pbzip2 -xvf foo.tpz

On second thoht, I can't use it inside tar because I need a -d parm to unzip it.
Back tot bzip2.
SJ

That's not a problem. tar adds the '-d' for extracts otr lists.

If you need to add options you can make a script like this, and put i ton your path,
[stevea@hypoxylon ~]$ cat bin/mypbzip2
#!/bin/bash
pbzip2 -v -m4 $@


Then use tar like ....
tar -I mypbzip2 -cvf foo.tpz ./some/files
tar -I mypbzip2 -tvf foo.tpz
tar -I mypbzip2 -xvf foo.tpz