Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site watmath.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!arwhite From: arwhite@watmath.UUCP (Alex White) Newsgroups: net.unix,net.unix-wizards Subject: Re: Stacked dump tapes Message-ID: <7175@watmath.UUCP> Date: Mon, 5-Mar-84 14:16:05 EST Article-I.D.: watmath.7175 Posted: Mon Mar 5 14:16:05 1984 Date-Received: Tue, 6-Mar-84 02:48:49 EST References: <1762@rlgvax.UUCP> Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario Lines: 19 Yes, it is about time that the stupid method of dealing with end of tape on unix disappears. I have changed the drivers locally as follows On the write which passes the EOT mark, normal status is returned. i.e. the block was written out correctly. On any future write, EEOT is returned, and the block isn't written. Thus, ordinary processes which know nothing about tapes run correctly, and there is no problem; however since they call perror you get a reasonable error message when they die. However, for smart processes, you can do a MTIOCEOT which say's that you know you've hit the end of tape, but you'd like to write out trailer records. It then lets you do whatever you like; even go off the end of the tape. On reads, you always get the block, it ignores the end of tape; its up to you to verify that correct tape marks were written. Anyhow, with this actually fairly trivial change, you can now very easily change dump to correctly handle end of tape. I have fixes for mt.c and ut.c if anybody wants them; you can of course also have the fix to dump.