tar - explicit spanning

[Adam Blomberg <junkmail@blomberg.ac>]

Good evening,

I'm trying to figure out how to use tar (preferrably with gzip) to create
a tarball which creates a new file when each .tar (or better yet, each
tar.gz) reaches a size of 2.2 Gbytes.  

Essentially, I want to archive a large directory into 2.2 Gbyte tarballs
which are "spanning" in nature.  I have an 18 Gbyte directory tree that I
want to compress into a set of 2.2 Gbyte archives so that I can copy the
individual tarballs onto separate DVD-RAM media later.  It appears that
the -M (multple) flag only works properly when you actually run out of
space on the medium you are archiving to.  Is there a way to force tar to
create iterative files in a specified size?

Thus far, I haven't figured it out from the man pages, nor from a number
of 'net searches of list archives.  If anybody knows the proper arguments
to achieve this, please let me know.  I absolutely refuse to use windows
to perform this spanning archive process, as I am trying to work solely in
GNU/Linux.

Thanks for your help.

regards,

-adam

junkmail@blomberg.ac 
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