Tar Segmentation

With today’s increased flash storage sizes, there may not be many occasions where you need to split files. However, when you do need to do so, I find tarto be a good toolfor that task (this hint is also useful if you want to split an archive before burning to DVDs).

The following use of bash’s brace expansion makes creating multi-volume tar files easy. To create a multi-file archive of a given length, use this:

tar --tape-length=102400 -cMv file=tar_archive.{tar,tar-{2..100}} [files to tar]

To extract from the archive:

tar -xMv --file=tar_archive.{tar,tar-{2..100}} [files to extract]

To create DVD-sized volumes, use --tape-length=4588544. In the above examples, replace [files to tar] and [files to extract] with the location(s) of the file(s) you wish to segment.

Copying a directory

tar cf - * | ( cd /target; tar xfp -) 

Tar via ssh

tar -czf - {source-dir} | ssh {host} "(cd {target-dir}; tar xzf -)"