The Tar Archive Format, Its Extensions, And Why GNU Tar Extracts In Quadratic Time
tl;dr: "The time estimate went from a bit over an hour, to multiple hours, to over a day, to almost a week. After giving it some time, and after failing to find anything helpful through Google, I decided that learning the tar file format and making my own tar extractor would probably be faster than waiting for tar. And I was right; before the day was over, I had a working tar extractor, and I had successfully extracted my 1.1TiB tarball."featured in #337