Tape dumping programs for Unix/Linux..

From: Douglas H. Quebbeman <dquebbeman_at_acm.org>
Date: Thu May 2 14:51:46 2002

> At the portion of the work where you just want to get the stuff
> spooled to a file, you dont care about "block size" yet, you
> just need to get it pulled off.
>
> Unix will treat any device as a stream of bytes

And therein lies the problem.

...

> Do you see what im getting at here ? hello ?

No, I don't, because your entire example was disk-centric,
which simply doesn't apply to tapes. Tell you what... how
about an empirical test?

Go buy a 9-track drive and hang it on your *nix box.

Let me send you a 9-track tape. You read it any way
you want. You send me the tape back.

Then you go get a second tape, and put the data back on
any way you want. Then send it to me, and I'll tell you
if your technique works or not.

You game?

-dq
Received on Thu May 02 2002 - 14:51:46 BST