reading in ascii files on a tape using tar?

[uunet!bria!mike]

In article <Jan.18.12.09.28.1991.8794 at romulus.rutgers.edu> romulus.rutgers.edu!fuentes (Carlos 666 Trott) writes:
>I will be getting several dozen labelled and unlabelled ascii
>tapes (some created on vaxen, others on big blue).  What command
>whould I use to copy these files from tape to disk.

Assuming that you know what the device name is for your tape (let's use
/dev/rmt0 in this example), your best bet is 'dd'; such as:

	dd if=/dev/rmt0 of=/tmp/diskfile

The 'dd' tool assumes nothing about the way that the tapes were created, etc.
It will just dump from the tape to a file; if the architecture that you're
read from is "backwards" (bytes are swapped), then add "conv=swab" to
the above line (ie: dd if=/dev/rmt0 of=/tmp/diskfile conv=swab).  This should
do it ... those files will be in one large file which you will have to
split up (by hand, or by writing a program to do it).

Good luck!
-- 
Michael Stefanik, Systems Engineer (JOAT), Briareus Corporation
UUCP: ...!uunet!bria!mike
--
technoignorami (tek'no-ig'no-ram`i) a group of individuals that are constantly
found to be saying things like "Well, it works on my DOS machine ..."