Lars Gustäbel <l...@gustaebel.de> added the comment: -1, although I can only speak for tarfile. Removing members from a tar archive sounds obvious and easy but it is *not*. A file in an archive is stored as a header block (that contains the metadata) followed by a number of data blocks (that contain the file's data). New files are simply appended to the archive file. There is no central table of contents whatsoever. To make things worse, a compressed archive is compressed in one go from the beginning right up to the end, it is not possible to access a member in the middle of an archive without having to decompress all data before it. Deleting files from an uncompressed archive is rather straightforward implementation-wise but IO intensive and risky. In contrast, there is no other way to delete files from a *compressed* tarfile than to make a copy of it omitting the unwanted files.
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