> <i>Because tar operations may be long running, it can be useful to have feedback about progress during the operation.</i><p>For those running on a system that has SIGINFO (e.g., BSD, macOS?), hit ^T and you'll get a status report to stderr. ^T should work for various other utilities as well: dd, cp, ftp.<p>On those systems that do not have SIGINFO (Linux?), but are using <i>bsdtar</i> (libarchive), SIGUSR1 will do the same:<p>* <a href="https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/search?q=SIGINFO" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/search?q=SIGINFO</a><p>INFO isn't one of the mandatory POSIX signals:<p>* <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(IPC)#POSIX_signals" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(IPC)#POSIX_signals</a>
Tar is a convenient format for basic embedded data storage since it's easy to parse and you don't have to build custom tooling to prepare them. We'd store small pre-gzipped web resources in a tar file and send them out as is without needing onboard compression. The blocking factor puzzled me for a bit when I was trying to store a few hundred bytes and couldn't understand where the extra 10k was coming from. Sometimes you have to RTFM.