I've got many files that I want to store in a single archive file. My first approach was to store the files in a gzipped tarball. The problem is, that I've to rewrite the whole archive if a single file is added. I could get rid of the gzip compression, but adding a file would still be expensive.
What other archive format would you suggest that allows fast append operations?
The ZIP file format was designed to allow appends without a total re-write and is ubiquitous, even on Unix.