It is not possible to split the compressed tar
archive into pieces without decompression: the compression is applied on top of the 'tar stream' and this stream is treated by a compressor as an opaque binary stream.
Thus, any tool that could produce a set of tar files from your original compressed tar archive will actually decompress it.
The tar
itself has no mode that takes a tar archive
as an input and produces another tar
as an output file apart from append
and delete
modes.
As your tar archive is pretty big, you probably don't want to decompress it several times to extract a files portion by portion while creating separate archive for each set of extracted files.
There is a python tar library that probably allows 'in flight' tar file processing (I am not as strong in python
to verify this myself). So you could develop a python script that would read items from the source archive and then append them to the current output archive until its size reaches a limit of your choice. Then, the script would create the next output archive and proceed further.
tar
combines a bunch of files into one big file.gzip
compresses the big file into a little file. Decompressing the one little file gives you one big file; extracting the one big file gives you a bunch of files.arj
archiver, viaapt install arj
.