Bash function to generate TAR file of a directory with MD5 checksums of included fly; can be used in conjunction with ls | xargs -n1 -I% bash -c 'tar_md5 "$*"' _ % to loop over directory contents

tar_md5_function.sh

#!/bin/bash

function tar_md5 {

DIR=${1}

if [[ -d $DIR ]]
  then 
  tar -cvpf ${DIR}.tar ${DIR}/| xargs -I '{}' sh -c "test -f '{}' &&  md5sum '{}'" | tee ${DIR}.md5
fi

}

export -f tar_md5