[CentOS] tar spanning

Thu May 15 03:27:45 UTC 2008
Nick Fenwick <neek at tcp.co.uk>

CentOS List wrote:
> I have a directory with 18GB worth of files and I would like to tar span and
> burn it into a few DVDs after that. How can I do this in command line?

For what it's worth, I usually use rar for this task, because I can 
figure out the command line in about 10 seconds by running 'rar' with no 
arguments and check the help output, and they confuse my Windows-y 
friends less if I need to pass them around.  Install rar from rpmforge.

To split a directory of files into roughly 700Mb bits:

rar a -v700000k rarname_to_create.rar dir_of_files

I recently wanted to split a large .iso of already highly compressed 
data into chunks that would fit on a FAT32 filesystem, so this is with 
no compression:

rar a -v700000k -m0 rarname_to_create.rar dir_of_files

I just noticed that Fajar beat me to quoting google hits relating to 
'tar | split' so I'll hold off doing the same :)

Nick