Is it possible to simultaneously pipe the output of a tar command to a split command and md5sum check?

Question

I have a compression command which I pipe to a md5sum check command as such:

   tar zcvpf file.tar.gz file | xargs -I '{}' bash -c "test -f '{}' && md5sum '{}'" | tee file_mybackup.md5

I would now like to split the tar.gz file into 100MB chunks. I can do this by:

   tar zcvpf - file | split -d -b 1M - file.tar.gz.

Is there a way that I can pipe the output of the tar command to simultaneously perform the split command and md5sum check? I know that split does not output to STDOUT so I can't pipe from the split command to the md5sum command. I tried to use a named pipe:

    mkfifo newpipe

    tar zcvpf - file | tee newpipe | split -d -b 1M - file.tar.gz. &

    cat newpipe | xargs -I '{}' bash -c "test -f '{}' && md5sum '{}'" | tee file_mybackup.md5

However this fails to output the md5sum output. Any help would be appreciated

Answer 1

Ok I eventually came to a solution

    tar zcvpf >(split -d -b 1M - file.) file | xargs -I '{}' bash -c "test -f '{}' && md5sum '{}'" | tee file.md5

I redirected stdin to the split command within the inital tar command whilst simultaneously piping the output of this tar to xargs. Hope this is of help to someone else.

Answer 2

Your Command:

tar zcvpf file.tar.gz file | xargs -I '{}' bash -c "test -f '{}' && md5sum '{}'" | tee file_mybackup.md5

...is no more efficient (in terms of minimizing drive reads) then this simpler command (i.e. no need of xargs):

tar zcvpf file.tar.gz file && md5sum file | tee file_mybackup.md5

because in both cases file is read once by tar and then a second time by md5sum

Unless there is something I am missing in what you are trying to achieve then the command you would need to minimize drive reads is:

cat file | tee >(md5sum | sed 's/-/file/' > file_mybackup.md5) | gzip -c | split -d -b 1M - file.gz.

Note: Since you are archiving a single file and not a directory I just used gzip instead of tar. Yes this does not store file permissions and will not work on a directory! ...was that a requirement?