Can't cat tape- big blocks?

[Boyd Roberts]

In article <14433 at dog.ee.lbl.gov>, torek at elf.ee.lbl.gov (Chris Torek) writes:
> It seems to me that the tape driver should return an error if you
> ask for 1K and the tape drive reads 10K.  Unfortunately, there is
> no obvious errno for this (ENOMEM? EINVAL? E2BIG? EFBIG? EMSGSIZE?
> ENOBUFS?).

I saw one driver hacked to return the amount not read.  No, not one
of my hacks.  I'm not sure whether it was such a good idea though.

Programs who blindly believe write() > 0 is ok, just won't work.
Smart archivers could benefit from it, but I think the cost
of broken programs would be too high.


Boyd Roberts			boyd at prl.dec.com

``When the going gets wierd, the weird turn pro...''