tar.gz alternative for archiving with ability to quickly display the archives contents

Question

Usually I create archives of data in linux at the commandline with tar & gzip (or pigz - as this uses parallel processing for compression).

However, listing the contents of such an archive is painfully slow because of the sequential format of tar archives. This is especially true if an archive contains many files that are several GB each.

What is an alternative to my combination to create gzipped tar archives of files in linux. Especially I'm looking for something that allows for a retrieval of the list or tree of files inside the archives, similar to tar - but much more performant?

Answer 1

7zip is probably the best solution nowadays.

ZIP format is a bit outdated and was designed for FAT filesystem, which is where many of its limitations come from.

dar also might be an option. But as far as I can tell there is only one developer and no community around (unlike 7zip which has several forks and ports made by independent developers).

Answer 2

zip? The zip file format contains a catalog of the contents (at the end, IIRC), which can be retrieved with zipinfo(1).