Cracking up with ansitape angst

[DanKarron at ucbvax.berkeley.edu]

I have tried all the suggestions received about ansitape. There is something
wrong with the way the program cracks its main arg list.

If I attempt to set the -b blocksize option, the program ignores the -f
option and reads its default, /dev/tape (silly for ansitape). Then it hangs
reading /dev/tape. The only way to get it to properly read /dev/mt/xmtape 
{ a link to xm0d0nr.1600 } is to leave out the -b option.

I also tried to see if i could eliminate the sawing behavior. I tried
dd if=/dev/mt/xmtape ibs=64k of=/dev/null, but it still does it.

Ansitape program man page says it will not allow a block size > 32K, but
the man page for xmt says that 64K blocksize is supported.

We can really use this utility to read mri tapes, and some attention to this
problem (either a sample command line that is proven to work, or a fixed
program) would make my code for reading vms mri/ct images packagable as
a script. As it stands now, the hardest part of getting mri pictures is
unloading the darn files-11/ansi tapes!


The ansitape program also does not allow you to read from stdin, and it
will not accept an "-f -" argument without an argument. Otherwise I could
use bstream or other buffer/blocking program like dd.

Cheers, and thanks!

dan.
.

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