GNU tar blocking factor, blocks, records and checkpoints

&gt; <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&#x27;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:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;libarchive&#x2F;libarchive&#x2F;search?q=SIGINFO" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;libarchive&#x2F;libarchive&#x2F;search?q=SIGINFO</a><p>INFO isn&#x27;t one of the mandatory POSIX signals:<p>* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Signal_(IPC)#POSIX_signals" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Signal_(IPC)#POSIX_signals</a>

Tar is a convenient format for basic embedded data storage since it&#x27;s easy to parse and you don&#x27;t have to build custom tooling to prepare them. We&#x27;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&#x27;t understand where the extra 10k was coming from. Sometimes you have to RTFM.