[HECnet] BRU tapes, extract on UNIX?

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2015-03-16 14:08, Clem Cole wrote:
The format is defined in:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/academic/computer-science/history/pdp-11/rsx/decus/rsx86a/301050/bruformat.txt
and yes UNIX has tools that grok it.

Worst case it any ANSI tape reader will get the raw data off as files
with strange names and you may need a shell script to put some of the
files back together after decoding the directory.

My old housemate (and SPICE2/3 author) Tom Quarles wrote an really good
ANSI tape reader for Unix years ago. It did VMS format by default but
seem to remember he added RT11 and RSX support to it also.   Since we had
to write tapes to export to those systems also.

Sadly, I used to have a directory of "magtape utilities" but I no longer
have it online.     I'll try to poke around to see if I can find it next
weekend if no one else shouts out sooner.

BRU tapes are proper ANSI format tapes, so as far as that goes, the whole saveset as such can certainly be accessed with any tool that deals with ANSI tapes.

However, BRU savesets is another level, below this. To extract files from those savesets will require other software. I don't think any exists for Unix, but you can certainly write it.

	Johnny


Clem



On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 1:05 AM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net
<mailto:b4 at gewt.net>> wrote:

      All,

      Is it possible to extract files from a BRU RSX tape on UNIX, or is
      the best path BRUREAD to VMS, and then zip/tar?

      --
      Cory Smelosky
      http://gewt.net Personal stuff
      http://gimme-sympathy.org Projects