Have you considered removing the direct write from tar as a bad idea as people
over write it all the time with formatted data on hard disks and even tapes
using a different program that uses a file system as the direct write doesn't
show up. The streaming function could be moved to a separate program that
reads a specified file and streams it to a location or device. This would
work with multimedia on internet servers which would just read locations to
stream to from a pipe with a add or drop so a common file could be sent to
multiple addresses.
