Sometimes it is necessary to convert existing GNU tar multi-volume
archive to a single tar archive. Simply concatenating all
volumes into one will not work, since each volume carries an additional
information at the beginning. GNU tar is shipped with the shell
script tarcat designed for this purpose.
The script takes a list of files comprising a multi-volume archive
and creates the resulting archive at the standard output. For example:
tarcat vol.1 vol.2 vol.3 | tar tf -
The script implements a simple heuristics to determine the format of
the first volume file and to decide how to process the rest of the
files. However, it makes no attempt to verify whether the files are
given in order or even if they are valid tar archives.
It uses dd and does not filter its standard error, so you
will usually see lots of spurious messages.
Published under the terms of the GNU General Public License
