Splitting tar output (and hairs)

[Jon maddog Hall]

Jim,

I do not have a tape drive here, so I am doing this by the seat of my pants.

[No flames for bad syntax laddies and lassies....I claim late-night excuses,
and "close enough for government work".]

As far as I know, the output stream of tar is the same going to tape or
any other device unless some option you apply changes it.

This syntax did not work?

tar cf - ./ $bkoptions | tee monthly.tar - >/dev/st0

The first hyphen tells tar to put the output to stdout, and the second
hyphen tells tee to put the stdin to stdout while also creating the
file "monthly.tar".  The right arrow captures stdout and puts it on the tape.