How can I create multipart tar file in Linux?

You can use the split command to split an archive in to multiple files. For example, if I wanted my archive stored in 1 MByte files:

tar -cvf - <stuff to put in archive> | split --bytes=1m --suffix-length=4 --numeric-suffix - myarchive.tar.

And when I want to recombine and untar:

cat myarchive.tar.* | tar xvf -

GNU Tar natively supports multiple volumes. There are many options, the one I found neat was

tar --create --multi-volume --file=/tmp/file1.tar --file=/tmp/file2.tar files_to_archive 

size can be specified via -L (tape-length)

It does not support compression in this manner however, so you would have to seperately do that. "tar: Cannot use multi-volume compressed archives"

Use tar c to create the tar archive, and specify the k size-in-kbytes parameter to control the maximum size of each part. You'll end up with ((original size)/(part size) + 1) parts.