Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.3 alpha 4/15/85; site ucbvax.ARPA Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!ucbvax!info-vax From: info-vax@ucbvax.ARPA Newsgroups: fa.info-vax Subject: Re: Problems writing /FOREIGN tapes Message-ID: <8660@ucbvax.ARPA> Date: Mon, 1-Jul-85 01:19:14 EDT Article-I.D.: ucbvax.8660 Posted: Mon Jul 1 01:19:14 1985 Date-Received: Tue, 2-Jul-85 04:43:02 EDT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.ARPA Organization: University of California at Berkeley Lines: 16 From: goldstein%star.DEC@decwrl.ARPA (Andy Goldstein) If you mount a tape /FOREIGN with all the defaults, RMS treats it as an unblocked tape. This means that when you COPY a file to the tape, each record in the file ends up as a separate block on the tape. Dating back from the old NRZI days, the ANSI tape standard says there shall be no tape records shorter than 18 bytes, shorter records being presumed to be noise bursts. The VMS (and most other DEC) tape driver enforces a minimum of 14 bytes, because that's what DOS file labels were (more ancient history). So anyway, you get the error if the file contains any lines shorter than 14 characters. COPY could pad the lines, but then it would have to be told what to pad them with, how would you unpad them on the other end, and there's much other ugliness involved. If you mount the tape with /RECORD=n, then RMS treats the tape as blocked fixed length records of length n. This may or may not be useful, depending on what you're trying to accomplish.