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From: lamy@utegc.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards,comp.unix.questions
Subject: Re: Remote magtape
Message-ID: <8704261055.AA03742@ephemeral.ai.toronto.edu>
Date: Sun, 26-Apr-87 06:55:33 EDT
Article-I.D.: ephemera.8704261055.AA03742
Posted: Sun Apr 26 06:55:33 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 26-Apr-87 08:35:42 EDT
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In article <15097@gatech.gatech.edu> hope@gatech.UUCP (Theodore Hope @ LEGOLAND) writes:
>I don't know if you'd consider the following a kludge, but I
>use the following to read a tar tape on a remote machine:
>
>   % rsh remote dd of=/dev/rmt8 ibs=10240 | tar xvf -	(tar bs of 20)

It's not a kludge, it's documented in the Sun man page :-).  Writing is a
bit harder, though, if you want to be able to do a 'tar r', since (quite
logically) tar r does not make sense on standard output.

4.3 tar handles remote drives, so I fished it out and compiled it and friends
on a Sun, but alas, no luck. 'tar r' works fine locally on the 4.3 BSD Vax,
but not from the Sun, where the subsequent archives don't show up in a tar t.
Looked in the source, and the rmt stuff looks perfectly orthodox.  We only
have one machine running 4.3, so I could not try from a remote one...

Also, I often find myself doing a big find -prune ... followed by a session
of purification with a text editor, in order to get a reasonable list of files
to put on tape.  In the absence of 'tar r', using xargs to handle a huge list
of arguments is out of the question, and the only tar I know that can read
standard input for its list of files is John Gilmore's etar, but that one
does not support on the fly change of directories, and does not follow
symbolic links.  Am I missing something?

Ah well.  I cross-posted to comp.unix.questions and redirected follow-ups
there.

Jean-Francois Lamy                           lamy@ai.toronto.edu (CSNet, UUCP)
AI Group, Dept of Computer Science,          lamy@ai.toronto.cdn (EAN)
University of Toronto, Ont, Canada M5S 1A4   lamy@ai.utoronto    (Bitnet)