Stacked dump tapes
Alex White
arwhite at watmath.UUCP
Tue Mar 6 05:16:05 AEST 1984
Yes, it is about time that the stupid method of dealing with end of tape
on unix disappears.
I have changed the drivers locally as follows
On the write which passes the EOT mark, normal status is returned.
i.e. the block was written out correctly.
On any future write, EEOT is returned, and the block isn't written.
Thus, ordinary processes which know nothing about tapes run
correctly, and there is no problem; however since they call perror
you get a reasonable error message when they die.
However, for smart processes, you can do a MTIOCEOT which say's
that you know you've hit the end of tape, but you'd like
to write out trailer records. It then lets you do whatever you
like; even go off the end of the tape.
On reads, you always get the block, it ignores the end of tape;
its up to you to verify that correct tape marks were written.
Anyhow, with this actually fairly trivial change, you can now very
easily change dump to correctly handle end of tape.
I have fixes for mt.c and ut.c if anybody wants them; you can of course
also have the fix to dump.
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