Creating useful .tar files

[fivemack]

Is there some series of command-line options to 'tar' which lets me create a tar file which contains the file called (with respect to the current directory) X/Y/Z/foo.baz but in such a way that, when my end-user unpacks the tar file, it comes out as R/S/bar.quux ?

It seems a natural thing for anyone doing packaging to want to do; the GNU info page for tar appears to be a dreadful combination of inadequate tutorial and inadequate reference manual, and I've been unable to figure out what to do merely by reading it.

Comments

[simont]

Hard linking is probably overkill; my usual approach is to symlink and use tar -h. Of course this fails if you also wanted your tar file to contain some real symlinks, at which point you probably do need to fall back to hard links or LD_PRELOAD or other diverse evils; but it works for my usual purposes at least.