All, I'm pleased to announce a major new release of the tar package for handling ".tar" archive files. http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/tar This release has a completely new and much improved API. See the hackage page for the API documentation. There are high level "all in one" functions for extracting or creating .tar files. More interestingly, it is easy to make variants by composing a pipeline. For example extracting a ".tar.gz" file is just:
Tar.unpack dir . Tar.read . GZip.decompress =<< BS.readFile tar
Or creating a ".tar.bz2" file:
BS.writeFile tar . BZip.compress . Tar.write =<< Tar.pack base dir
In addition it provides a full api for inspecting and constructing tar files without having to pack or unpack to local files. The functions are lazy which allows large archives to be processed in constant space. It is based on the tar handling code that has been in use in the cabal-install program for the last year or so. It has been tested on a large number of real world .tar.gz files so compatibility should be pretty good. There is also an 'htar' tool which is essentially a demo program for the tar library. It implements the common subset of the command line interface of the standard tar program, including gzip and bzip compression. Thanks to Christian Maeder for feedback on pre-release versions. Duncan