🐳 Vaar 📦

Vaala archive is a tar archive tool & library optimized for lots of small files.

Written in Golang, vaar performs operations in parallel & fully utilizes the POSIX APIs to reduce filesystem overheads.

Vaar is capable of tar creation & extraction. It works only on Linux & macOS.

Vaar is in beta. Some bugs are still out there 🙏

Install

Go 1.16+ is required to compile vaar.

As a command

go install github.com/moycat/vaar/cmd/vaar@latest

As a library

import "github.com/moycat/vaar"

CLI Usage

Suppose you have $GOPATH/bin in your PATH.

The common usage to create a tarball is:

vaar create [-c <algorithm>] [-l <level>] [-r <read_ahead>] <tarball> <file ...>

Arguments:

• -c <algorithm>: Compression algorithm, lz4 or gzip. No compression by default.
• -l <level>: Compression level, fastest, fast, default, good or best.
• -r <read_ahead>: Read ahead size, the maximum number of files to be walked and stated ahead. 512 by default.

Examples:

• Create a tarball with LZ4 compression: vaar c -c lz4 archive.tar.lz4 seagrass kombu
• Create a tarball with a large read ahead size: vaar c -r 4096 archive.tar shrimps

The common usage to extract a tarball is:

vaar extract [-c <algorithm>] [-d <target>] [-s <buffer_threshold>] [-t <thread>] [-r <read_ahead>] <tarball>

Arguments:

• -c <algorithm>: Compression algorithm, lz4 or gzip. No compression by default.
• -d <target>: Extraction target path. . by default.
• -s <buffer_threshold>: The size threshold for a file to be buffered in KiB. 512 by default.
• -t <thread>: The number of buffered extraction thread. 4 by default.
• -r <read_ahead>: Read ahead size, the maximum number of files to be extracted ahead. 512 by default.

Examples:

• Extract a LZ4-compressed tarball to /tmp: vaar x -c lz4 -d /tmp archive.tar.lz4
• Extract a tarball with high concurrency: vaar x -s 4096 -t 32 -r 2048 archive.tar

Appendix

Vaal means whale in Estonian, with Vaala being its genitive form.

Gigantic baleen whales like blue whales eat a large volume of tiny fish and shrimp with extremely high efficiency, by swallowing and filtering tons of water every time they open their mouths.

 ________
< Yummy! >
 --------
    \
     \
      \
                    ##        .
              ## ## ##       ==
           ## ## ## ##      ===
       /""""""""""""""""___/ ===
  ~~~ {~~ ~~~~ ~~~ ~~~~ ~~ ~ /  ===- ~~~
       \______ o          __/
        \    \        __/
          \____\______/