TAR suggestion...

[Dennis Pund]

To whom it may concern,

First I want to say that I admire your (GNU's) work.  Second I would
like to make a suggestion in reguards to TAR.  I am using tar to create
backups for my systems.  I store these backups in two places, a massive
storage system (that I don't have direct control over) and on CDR's. On
the Massive Storage system, everything fits into one file.  On the CDR's
it spans several volumes. I want to be able to save the tar archive to the
Mass Store as a single file first, then at a later date, create the CDR
copy as a Multi-volume archive without storing to an intermediate
location.  At first I was going to pipe the data to to tar and have tar
create a multi-volume archive to put on CDR's.  Unfortunately I cann't
figure out how to get tar to create an archive from standard input.

What I would like to do is:

foo my.tar.gz | tar -xzOf - | tar -cMf - -L 650000 - | bar

where 'foo' is a program that retrieves the archive and streams it to
stdout and bar is a program that streams the stdin to CDR. The only thing
I am missing is the ablity to have tar interpret the '-' at the end as
'read from stin' or some flag ( -I Maybe ) similar to the -O flag but for
stdin. 

I don't know if I just overlooked something, but this seems like the most
logical way to transfer archives between media of different sizes.  If
there is a method to do this that I am just too dense to find, I would be
most gratefull if you could point in the right direction.  If not, what do
you think about adding this to TAR. 

Thanks,
-Dennis


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