Editing Tar (computing) (section)

==Rationale==
Many historic tape drives read and write variable-length [[Block (data storage)|data blocks]], leaving significant wasted space on the tape between blocks (for the tape to physically start and stop moving).  Some tape drives (and raw disks) support only fixed-length data blocks. Also, when writing to any medium such as a file system or network, it takes less time to write one large block than many small blocks.  Therefore, the tar command writes data in records of many 512&nbsp;[[Byte|B]] blocks.  The user can specify a blocking factor, which is the number of blocks per record. The default is 20, producing 10&nbsp;[[Kibibyte|KiB]] records.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://ftp.gnu.org/old-gnu/Manuals/tar/html_node/tar_130.html |title=Blocking |website=ftp.gnu.org |access-date=2020-08-26}}</ref>