Mandrake Question

[GratefulUser]

Just curious about something. Im using Mandrake 9.1 on a not so old system (P3-450 512MB RAM) and its freshly installed. When trying to untar a tarball, if I browse into it using File Manager and do a copy/paste into another folder it takes a considerable amount of time (many minutes). Where if I use a console window and "tar xjvf <yada yada>" it takes mere seconds. Not being a Linux veteran I thought id ask here if anyone knows why this happens.

Thanks

[junk]

Sounds like your file manager is untarring it for every file it's copying, that's the only thing I can think of that would make that much of a difference in times.

To make myself more clear (because the answer I just gave seems a bit muddled): When you do the command line "tar xjvf <filename>", all the files are untarred and you can move them wherever. When you browse into the tar file using the file manager, (I think) what happens is this:

Untar entire file
Copy one file to new directory
Delete all the untarred files
Untar entire file (again)
Copy next file to new directory
Delete all the untarred files
etc

[GratefulUser]

Very well explained. Thanks :)

[Freakyuno]

Thats exactaly whats happening. Although the window managers and X have gotten alot better over the years, the power of Linux I am finding more and more is still in the console.

I have the same issue with RH8 and RH9 no matter which window manager I run. The non RPM based distro's out there may be better for this type of thing, but havent worked with them to much.

This whole concept isnt new, and isn't isolated to linux either. It has something to do with the way your window manager must populate an array when you open a window that contains a list area with directory information, if you think of double clicking on a folder in windows that contains a gig or so of info, that you havent accessed in a while, it takes some time to open, but CD'ing to the directory is instantanious. Not exactaly the same situation, but along the same code lines.

[Cryonic]

I don't think that is because the distro is rpm based, but because of the file manager chosen by said distro. I use fairly light WM's most of the time (IceWM for example) and so spend most of my time interfacing with key commands like tar in an xterm while still being able to use GUI apps like Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc...