huge file, spanning multiple tapes

[Jacques A. Vidrine]

I thought this would be an easy problem to solve, but I haven't found
a decent solution after a bit of looking.

I have a huge file, say 73GB.  I need to dump it to tapes that have
a capacity of about 33GB each (but there is hardware compression, so
there is no exact capacity).

If the file would fit on a single tape, I'd just use good 'ole dd(1).

I figured, heck, somebody is _bound_ to have written a simple utility
that, say, reads from a pipe and writes to tape (or vice versa), and
prompts for a tape switch when it hits end-of-tape.  But alas, I
cannot find such a beast.

Using dump, cpio, etc is not really an option.  I need to be able to
later read the data from tape into a pipe without it hitting disk.

Anybody have bright ideas?

Cheers,
-- 
Jacques Vidrine   . NTT/Verio SME      . FreeBSD UNIX       . Heimdal
nectar at celabo.org . jvidrine at verio.net . nectar at freebsd.org . nectar at kth.se