split tar file into two (or more) files

[petern]

Hi all good helpers.

I have created a packed tar file .tgz, but its total size becomes very large and difficult to handle (the data I have stored is very large...).

Is there a way to split a .tgz file into many (and of course: is there then an easy way to concatenate them again...)

/ Peter

[hayne]

You could of course just create several different tar files, each with a subset of the files.

But if you want to keep with the one tar file approach, you could split it up into pieces by using /usr/bin/split (with the "-b" option) - read 'man split'.
And then to rejoin them into one big file again, you could use /bin/cat

[petern]

thanks, that's exactly what I needed!

[acme.mail.order]

Unless you must have a unix-only solution look at hdiutil - make a segmented disk image. Very desktop-friendly, the files are separate but it behaves as a single image.

[LizardtheFish]

More info for beginners. I accomplished the above process successfully with these commands:

tar'ed the file with:
nohup nice tar -cf /foo.bu.tar /fooSource &

split the file into 500MB chunks with:
nohup nice split --line-bytes=500m foo.tar.gz foo_ &

rejoined the file with:
nohup nice cat foo_a* > foo_FULL.tar.gz &

hope it works for you too...

BTW, the nohup, nice and '&' are just for running the contained command considerately in the background of my terminal window because the processes took so long.

Lizard