Check the man page for the tape driver. There should be a no-rewind style of device file. It might be /dev/nrsa1 or something like that. You need to use that device file. Then do dd without count= or skip= so that dd will encounter the filemarks. the first dd will read the first file on the tape and leave the tape positioned to read the second file. So you just run a second dd command to read that file. And continue until you have all of the files. Another way would be the mt command. It will have some option to forward space files. So you might be able to do "mt -f /dev/nrsa1 fsf 3", and follow that by a dd to read only file 4 (assuming that you started with the file rewound). And you can use the mt command to explicitly rewind the tape when you need that.