1/2" tape cleaners?

On Sun, 24 Oct 2004, Ethan Dicks wrote: You dont need 'mt' (under any UNIX system) to read non-local tape formats. It doesn't even work that way: by using 'mt' to set the block size, you only set its *reblocking* factor. When reading raw tapes (meaning: read them, as they come), you need to tell the driver exactly that: no cooking up block sizes, just give the user whatever comes in. Usually, this is handled by opening the "raw" mode device for that tape. I don't use Linux, but assuming it at least TRIES to adhere to a standard, you should be able to use /dev/r{nameoftape}{unitnumber} as in /dev/rst0 for the first detected tape unit on the SCSI bus. This causes the driver to disable reblocking, and allocate a large buffer space so it can cope with whatever comes its way. Older systems had a limit of 16KB in that buffer, this is probably more like 64KB nowadays. So, your program does fd = open("/dev/rst0", READ) and then enters a loop, reading blocks from the tape: for(;;) { len = read(fd, mybuff, sizeof(mybuff)) if (len < 0) /* we have problems, scotty, beam us up! */ /* len now has the size of the block we just read */ } where usually, a length of 0 indicates an EOF (end of logical file, aka "first tape mark detected") or EOT (end of tape, aka "second consequtive tape mark detected") situation. --f