Untarring

So I was trying to untar a large archive — a time consuming process — and had the problem that the laptop was going to sleep while I was doing it. I don’t seem to be able to completely turn off the hibernation settings on this machine, so below is my solution as to a DIY mouse jiggler. Unfortunately I discovered that even with this the process crashed (both in GNU tar and WinRAR), presumably because those programs were never designed/tested with ultra-large archives in mind… Which to be honest is a little surprising! Anyway, I can’t imagine anyone else needs it (although it includes source code, so maybe that’s more useful), but for posterity I posted my own untar utility for Windows.

7 Comments

  1. ferg wrote:

    Speaking of freaks:

    https://www.archive.org/details/Freaks_401

    The old 1933 film of the circus freaks hits the public domain for download. :)

    Sunday, August 10, 2008 at 12:21 am | Permalink
  2. Fredrik Seidevall wrote:

    I’m curious. Just how big was the archive?

    Sunday, August 10, 2008 at 4:21 am | Permalink
  3. estrojenn wrote:

    the mouse jiggler rules. patent that bad boy now!

    Sunday, August 10, 2008 at 5:48 am | Permalink
  4. Shannon wrote:

    Fredrik – It’s about 80 gig — MP3 files, a zillion digital camera photos (many duplicated due to a filing mistake), etc… I’ve actually discovered that the crash is not software related, but OS related… Something to do with an upper limit on the number of file operations it seems. Working on a patch now, so I’ll update the utility (not that I really think anyone needs it but me).

    Sunday, August 10, 2008 at 7:20 am | Permalink
  5. p7tms wrote:

    Shannon,
    I heard on the news about a propane explosion in Toronto – I hope you, your family, and your friends are all safe

    Monday, August 11, 2008 at 8:11 am | Permalink
  6. Shannon wrote:

    Thanks. I live downtown, so I was far away from it…

    Monday, August 11, 2008 at 2:17 pm | Permalink
  7. Ze wrote:


    you have a great swastiparquet!!!he he he!!!

    Thursday, August 14, 2008 at 10:04 am | Permalink
Wow Shannon, that's really annoying! What is it, 1997 on Geocities? Retroweb is NOT cool!

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