Rman does not use all of the allocated channels

Oracle 8.1.7.4, AIX 5.2

I have a script which does an rman backup using the controlfile instead
of a recovery catalog.  

The relevant portion of the script looks like this:

rman  target <id>/<password> nocatalog <<EOF
run {
        allocate channel ch1 type disk format '<filepath>_1.rbk';
        allocate channel ch2 type disk format '<filepath>_2.rbk';
        allocate channel ch3 type disk format '<filepath>_3.rbk';
        allocate channel ch4 type disk format '<filepath>_4.rbk';
        allocate channel ch5 type disk format '<filepath>_5.rbk';
        backup database;
        sql 'ALTER SYSTEM ARCHIVE LOG CURRENT';
}
exit
EOF

(The remaining code in the script backs up the control files and
compresses the .rbk files.)


After I added a data file to one of my tablespaces, rman decided not to
use channel 5.  

After seeing what had happened I verified that I had a good backup by
doing a test restore of the database on a development machine.

Any ideas what made rman decide not to use one of the allocated channels
and is this something that I should be concerned about?

Thanks,
Peter Schauss
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