Splitting tar output

[Michael ODonnell]

>Does anyone know how to create a tar tape archive and disk file 
>archive at the same time?
>
>    The present system does something like:
>cd /
>tar -cf $bkdir/monthly.tar ./ $bkoptions


After that point I'd then instead consider just saying:

   dd if=$bkdir/monthly.tar of=/dev/st0 ibs=X obs=Y

...where X is something like 10240k and Y is whatever blocking
factor is suitable for your tape.  No need to make tar do the
same thing twice when you've already got all the same bits in
the on-disk archive.  In fact, that makes it quite probable
that the two archives will NOT be bit-for-bit identical.