Can I get tar to not use the filesystem cache when reading files?

I think this has been answered here:

There is the nocache utility, which can prepended to a command like ionice and nice. It works by preloading a library which adds posix_fadvise with the POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED flag to any open calls.

In simple terms, it advises the kernel that caching is not needed for that particular file; the kernel will then normally not cache the file. See here for the technical details.

It does wonders for any huge copy jobs, e. g. if you want to backup a multi terabyte disk in the background with the least possible impact on you running system, you can do something along nice -n19 ionice -c3 nocache cp -a /vol /vol2.