rsyncing from a compressed tarball.

[Simon Hobson]

Ed Peschko <horos22 at gmail.com> wrote:

> As it stands right now, we use xz for our compression, so if rsync had
> a similar option for xz that would probably be an improvement.

Have xz as an option for what ?
As others have already pointed out, rsync works with files on filesystems - it does not work with files embedded in other files. In the same way, it doesn't work with a disk partition and work out what files are held within the filesystem on that partition - you are expected to mount that filesystem so rsync can access the files. It would be incredibly wasteful (understanding filesystems construction) to duplicate that functionality into rsync !

I'd concur with others - if there's something like a fuse module to mount the compressed archive as a (read-only) fileystem then use that, otherwise you'll need to re-assess the whole process.