Bug #72219 for Archive-Tar: a ptarfilter (ptarmap, ptarsplit) application, please?

Occasionally, it's necessary to process each of the files in the archive with an arbitrary filter program. It'd be nice if Archive::Tar could contain a program allowing one to do just that. (Without unpacking the whole archive first, of course.) Possible usage example (assuming no archive member has a vertical line character as part of its filename): $ tar -C /bin/ -c -- bash dash \ | ptarmap -v -- bash -c 'sha1sum | sed -e "s|-|${FILE}|"' bash add19e504c254758f2ea8dcda3821c77fafb4923 bash dash 7f123974c1814d026a26e79981453881efb49916 dash $ I've posted a possible implementation to news:alt.sources recently [1], but I believe it requires some more polishing. (Check the Bugs list in its README.) BTW, given that a Tar archive could be viewed as a sequence of “sub-archives”, I see a lot of similarity between the command suggested and split(1) (especially its GNU incarnation.) Therefore, one might try to implement more sophisticated usage patterns, like: $ ptarsplit --member-bytes=1M -- my.tar my.x (no more than 1 MiB of data per each of the resulting Tar archives; unless there're individual members of larger size); $ ptarsplit --members=16 -- my.tar my.x (no more than 16 archive members per each of the resulting Tar archives; may be combined with --member-bytes=); $ ptarsplit --exec --members=1 --no-header --no-trailer \ -- bash -c 'sha1sum | sed -e "s|-|${FILE}|"' \ < my.tar (like [1]; perhaps a ptarmap wrapper, or a --map option, for this mode.) TIA. [1] news:87d3d6blw0.fsf@violet.siamics.net http://groups.google.com/group/alt.sources/browse_thread/thread/99533bf17ccff3fb -- FSF associate member #7257