gnu tar suggestion: create tar without zeros at end

[Bijwaard, Dennis (Dennis)]

Hi,

I would like to suggest an option to gnu tar to leave out the end-of-tar or 
zeros at the end so that it is easier to concatenate tar's together in a loop 
without needing the gnu-tar specific -i option at the receivers end. This for 
instance makes sense when one wants to generate a tar file from a cgi-script 
consisting of multiple files that is downloaded by a windows/unix user which 
might not have this option in his version of tar.

In short, I would like to be able to create a loop like:

for i in foo bar ; do modify_file $i $i.modified ; tar --without-zero-end cf - 
$i.modified ; rm $i.modified ; done
# concat last tar including the zero-end
modify_file foobar foobar.modified ; tar cf - foobar.modified

The output of this simple script would be a tar file that can be used without 
--ignore-zeros.

Kind regards,
                Dennis
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Lucent Technologies
                    Bell Labs Innovations

Dennis Bijwaard (mailto:address@hidden)
Developer New Technologies, Bell Labs AT Twente
Capitool 5, NL-7521 PL Enschede, The Netherlands
Phone. +31 35 6875718 or +31 53 4845718, Fax: +31 53 4845777