scsi tape drive jargon ..

[Anurag Jalan <a_jalan vsnl com>]

Hi all,

I've just moved from taper 6.9a to a raw tar ( shell script based solution
) , because taper has an archive limitation of 4Gb . I've installed a
package called dds2tar that is supposed to speed up extraction from the
archive .

The dds2tar documentation says te following commands extract a table with
block and record info of all files in one archive . So, if the archive is
the 10th file of he tape then :

#mt asf 10
#dds2index -t my-archive-table -f /dev/nst0

Then if *everything* under glibc is to be extracted , the following
command needs to be given :

dds2tar -t my-archive-table 'glibc*' | tar -f - -xvv

Finally the docs say that I can use the output of tar -Rtv , to know the
block number of the 1st block and IF THE BLOCKSIZE is known, then I can
compute the ARCHIVE NUMBER ( 10 in the example above ) .

By now, I am thoroughly confused :( I'd be grateful, if anyone can decode
the instructions for me ..

Regards

Anurag