поставлю плюс, если покажите новую фичу tar'а с 2006-го, которой вы хоть раз пользовались.

Finally, the most flexible approach is to use a volume script, that
writes new archive name to the file descriptor `$TAR_FD'.  For example,
the following volume script will create a series of archive files, named
`ARCHIVE-VOL', where ARCHIVE is the name of the archive being created
(as given by `--file' option) and VOL is the ordinal number of the
archive being created:

     #! /bin/sh
     echo Preparing volume $TAR_VOLUME of $TAR_ARCHIVE.

     name=`expr $TAR_ARCHIVE : '\(.*\)-.*'`
     case $TAR_SUBCOMMAND in
     -c)       ;;
     -d|-x|-t) test -r ${name:-$TAR_ARCHIVE}-$TAR_VOLUME || exit 1
               ;;
     *)        exit 1
     esac

     echo ${name:-$TAR_ARCHIVE}-$TAR_VOLUME >&$TAR_FD

   The same script can be used while listing, comparing or extracting
from the created archive.  For example:

     # Create a multi-volume archive:
     $ tar -c -L1024 -f archive.tar -F new-volume .
     # Extract from the created archive:
     $ tar -x -f archive.tar -F new-volume .

Notice, that the first command had to use `-L' option, since otherwise
GNU `tar' will end up writing everything to file `archive.tar'.

[не считая новых компрессоров, т.к. это тривиально].

результат вас немного расстроит.