The tardy program is a tar post-processor. It may be used to manipulate the
file headers in tar archive files in various ways.

The reason the tardy program was written was because the author wanted to
"spruce up" tar files before posting them to the net, mostly to remove
artefacts of the development environment, without introducing more.

The tardy program was designed to allow you to alter certain characteristics
of files after they have been included in the tar file. Among them are:
   * change file owner (by number or name)
   * change file group (by number or name)
   * add directory prefix (e.g. dot)
   * change file protections (e.g. from 600 to 644)

Note that all of these affect ALL files in the archive.

WWW: http://www.canb.auug.org.au/~millerp/tardy.html