I wish to make a duplicate of the contents of a DAT tape, for backup PURPOSES, on a device running HP-UX, if that's important. My thought is to
1) view the contents of the source tape,
2) COPY the contents of the source tape to a directory on the hard DRIVE,
3) insert a destination tape,
4) format the destination tape as needed,
5) copy the contents from the directory on the hard drive to the destination tape,
6) and view the contents of the destination tape, to verify all files copied.

Somewhere along the LINE I am pretty sure I need to use the dd command, but my Unix knowledge is too little and too many years in cold storage. The DAT drive is /dev/rdt/tape2.

Please help. Thanks!

Stephen :-?Yes, dd would be the way to go, but I never work with tapes, so I'm guessing a little. Do you have sufficient hard drive space to store the contents of the tape streamer? If so, dd in then dd out should do the trick (subject to whatever preformatting you need to do with tapes - I wouldn't know).

I think you probably got there on your own; man dd and try it.Here is an article with some basic commands.

Tape Drives in Linux