Hi
I am trying to do a tar command to a magnetic tape drive as a non-root user. However I am getting a Permission denied error. Is there any file which I need to modify in order to allow non-root user to use the tar command? The synthax of the command which I used is as such:

tar -cvf /dev/st0 /opt/logs

It seems you are trying to make an archive of /dev/st0 and /opt/logs. The only part of the command that is missing is the archive name to create, which should follow immediately after the -f option;

tar -cvf archive.tar /dev/st0 /opt/logs

This isnt'a distro specific question so I'll throw out a good page I use for help with this kind of stuff, perhpas it'll come in handy for you too.
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_File_Compression

I'm sure there are a million sites like though.

Hi
/dev/st0 is actually the device file for the magnetic tape drive. So I'm performing a tar command to the magnetic tape drive with the contents of /opt/logs. This is actually working if I were to perform the command as a root user. I am not looking for any synthax errors. The problem arises if I were to perform this command using a non-root user. I would get the permission denied error. So I'm wondering if this has anything to do with tar command or has it anything to do with writing to a device file?

Thanks for the help!

If you get a permission error, then you need to login as root give the user read permission for the tape drive.

Thanks! I got it! Solve my problem. Really appreciate your help here.