Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!munnari!mimir!hugin!augean!sirius!jeremy From: jeremy@chook.ua.oz (Jeremy Webber) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: Accessing a VAX tape drive from a S Message-ID: Date: 9 Sep 88 07:16:05 GMT References: <711@auvax.UUCP> <43200035@uicsrd.csrd.uiuc.edu> <3463@phri.UUCP> Sender: news@sirius.ua.oz Organization: Computer Science, Adelaide University, Australia Lines: 15 In-reply-to: roy@phri.UUCP's message of 7 Sep 88 12:07:42 GMT Posting-Front-End: GNU Emacs 18.41.44 of Fri May 13 1988 on chook (berkeley-unix) In article <3463@phri.UUCP> roy@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@chook.ua.oz.au)