Imaging a Tape

On Wed, Mar 6, 2013 at 3:54 PM, Torfinn Ingolfsen <tingox at gmail.com> wrote: That would not work because the record information would be lost, and the requirement was to make a replica of the tape (in addition 'dd' will only read until the first EOF mark and then stop.) I have been using a piece of software I wrote years ago which does essentially what the previously mentioned 'tcopy' does, but in addition it can write to files. It's a very simple tool I'm sure many others have also written, what it does boils down to the following: while (not eof) { record_size = read (tape deviice. record) write (file, record_size, 4) // writes a 4-byte record with the record size if (record_size > 0) { write (file, record, record_size) // write record } } The disk file will then consist of 'records' prepended with a 4-byte value with the record size. End-of-file marks on the tape (between files) will be indicated with a record size of zero. At the end of the tape, write 2 ore more zero-size records (ANSI tapes often used 2 or 3 EOF marks to indicate e-o-t or e-o-v). To generate a new tape from the file just write a tool to understand this simple format and write back record-by-record with size as indicated in the file. -Tor