tar: Tarcat

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1 9.6.3 Concatenate Volumes into a Single Archive
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1 Sometimes it is necessary to convert existing GNU 'tar' multi-volume
1 archive to a single 'tar' archive.  Simply concatenating all volumes
1 into one will not work, since each volume carries an additional
1 information at the beginning.  GNU 'tar' is shipped with the shell
1 script 'tarcat' designed for this purpose.
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1    The script takes a list of files comprising a multi-volume archive
1 and creates the resulting archive at the standard output.  For example:
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1      tarcat vol.1 vol.2 vol.3 | tar tf -
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1    The script implements a simple heuristics to determine the format of
1 the first volume file and to decide how to process the rest of the
1 files.  However, it makes no attempt to verify whether the files are
1 given in order or even if they are valid 'tar' archives.  It uses 'dd'
1 and does not filter its standard error, so you will usually see lots of
1 spurious messages.
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