Piping output of tar(1) into another tar(1) command

[Pete French]

> I have a massive Gzip'd tar archive that I need to put onto tape (DAT) 
> as I need the disk space. I don't have enough disk space to extract the 
> archive to a temporary location in order to archive it to tape therefore 
> I need to do it directly by piping the output of the archive extraction 
> to the tar(1) command to write it to tape.

If the gile is already in tar format why dont you just write it to the
tape directly with dd ? If youy dont want the tape version to be compressed
then run it though gzip along the way.

i.e. dd if=myfile.tar.gz of=/dev/st0 bs=8192

(whatever the approrpiate device and block size parameters are for your tape)

-bat.