tape to tape copy

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <1205 at manta.NOSC.MIL> bigjohn at manta.NOSC.MIL (John Morris) writes:
>One method involves the 'dd' command but this involves having enough
>disk space to accomodate the file.

You should be able to "dd" from tape to tape, also.

>Question: Is there a way, if you have two cartridge tape drives, to
>directly move the data from one tape onto the other through a reasonable 
>size buffer.

There is also a simple utility commonly called "tcopy" for copying tapes
(or other files where preserving record size is important).  Look around
for it on your system; if you can't find it I could mail you a version.

The big problem with "streaming" tapes is that they are horribly slow
if you can't keep them streaming, which UNIX applications seldom can.