Accessing a VAX tape drive from a S

[Jeremy Webber]

In article <3463 at phri.UUCP> roy at phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) writes:
>	"A standard tape consists of a series of 1024 byte records
>	terminated by an end-of-file."
>
>	   I'm not sure what this is doing in a section 4 man page.  Certainly
>  the kernel has no concept of what a standard tape looks like, nor does it
>  prefer to write 1024 byte records over any other size.

This probably refers to the "cooked" tape devices, in which the tape driver
handles the blocking independently of read(2) and write(2).  Since most people
prefer to specify their own tape blocking I have never seen anything which uses
cooked tape devices.  They are of no use when using utilities such as tar and
dump.

		-jeremy webber (jeremy at chook.ua.oz.au)