[HECnet] tape image manipulations...

[Clem Cole]

Many thanks.
I think we all have created a library of tape tools over the years.    I'll put on my todo this to get my set together.


As for the OSX lack of mtio.h - i've just pulled it from FreeBSD and never had an issue - obviously there is not driver. I 100% agree -- it does seems nuts and I've b*tched at my friends at Apple about it a few times.    Another thing I have on my todo list is try to slide the drivers back into an hackintosh i had running on a vm in a system that has an old DEC/Adaptec PCI card in it that I still use for SCSI tapes.    That said, when I have needed the tape I've just used the BSD driver on the base system.


Clem


On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 5:51 AM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
Since from time to time, I get questions about the different tape image formats that exists, as well as how to read/write tapes from Unix, I decided to publish a set of small programs I initially write many, many years ago. In the process of cleaning things up to make them more presentable, I also made them more flexible. The odd person might have seen these programs in earlier reincarnations from me at some point in time.

Anyway, I have a set of four programs, that a few people might find useful, if they play on Unix systems.

tpr - reads from a physical tape and creates an image on disk
tpw - reads an image from disk and writes it to a physical tape
tpc - copy/convert a disk image
tpx - examine/verify a disk image

These programs will handle both .tpc images (2 byte record length headers) and .tap images (4 byte record length headers and footers).
The programs tries to automatically identify the format of the file, but you can also force a format.

They are still extremely simple and stupid programs, and have very little error handling, or help. Feel free to ask if you have questions. Suggestions, as well as patches are also welcome.

The files can be found under ftp://ftp.update.uu.se/pub/pdp11/tptools.tar

(And yes, I know they will not compile under OSX - Apple in their infinite wisdom have dropped support for tapes, and thus mtio.h no longer is around, and their man-pages also have big holes around tapes, where plenty of references from other man-pages exists... tpc and tpx is easy to fix for OSX though, but you're out of luck as far as tpr and tpw goes...)

            Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                           || "I'm on a bus
                                                   ||   on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se                   ||   Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                               ||   tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol