SCSI Tape to TAP utility

[Jay Jaeger]

On 8/9/2015 12:36 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
> Good OS-es allowed an operator to mount tapes for his next few jobs,
> without paying attention to paper labels and have the OS automatically
> locate and assign tapes to the proper job.
> 
> Can UNIX do that?
> 
> --Chuck
> 

Seems dangerous to me: duplicate data set names on different tapes would
confuse it (plus, if the DSN is long, the entire DSN does not actually
appear in the tape label).  I worked with OS/360 and MVS in my career
and we never did anything like that with it.

Certainly one could imagine writing a process in Unix (or most any OS,
for that matter) to do something like that where a separate process
managed the tape drives, and then processes could connect to it to ask
for tape data based on the label.  I just can't imagine anyone WANTING
to do that.

JRJ