Not to belabor the point, but bonsky just asked how to expire a tape which does not require anything but the bpexpdate command. This of course would leave it in the same pool as it had been, which in my case is what I desire. I'm not clear on what BSWIP means by "will still be assigned and therefore cannot be moved to the scratch pool." Perhaps our operations are handled differently than at other locations, but we don't have a need for a scratch pool per se. If I want to reassign a tape from one pool to another, I just highlight the tape(s) in Media and Device Management, press the right mouse button, select Change, and select New Pool and enter the pool name that I want to move the tapes to. Or alternately use Actions, Change.
I will say that additional useful information such as the references to vmquery provide increased knowledge of NetBackup and make us all better managers of the software, so don't get me wrong. I just prefer to use as few steps as possible to accomplish my goal. My point is that I've never had to use the vmquery command to expire a tape. If someone would like to point out the advantage (or need) of using vmquery, then I and others would hopefully gain from that information.