rman allocating channel

[BeefStu]

I have a RMAN script that I am building to do a logical validation of datafiles
against an oracle 11.1.0.7 DB on Solaris 5.10. I want the script to allocate
the channels. I tried several variations of the format but below but can't appear to get it to work. Can somebody provide me with the correct syntax
or a good example.

Below is my script and the error I am getting.


rman nocatalog target=/ < ALLOCATE CHANNEL t1 DEVICE TYPE disk;
backup blocks all check logical validate datafile $DATAFILE;
release channel t1;
exit;
EOT



RMAN>
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-00569: =============== ERROR MESSAGE STACK FOLLOWS ===============
RMAN-00571: ===========================================================
RMAN-00558: error encountered while parsing input commands
RMAN-01009: syntax error: found "identifier": expecting one of: "for"
RMAN-01008: the bad identifier was: t1
RMAN-01007: at line 1 column 18 file: standard input