🚀 go-pugleaf

This is cross-posted to SOS-DATA, IASSIST and to UW tech-partners; sorry for
duplication.

This on at the behest of one of our faculty.

The short form of the question:

      Is there a UNIX utility 'on the net' which will gracefully read 9-track
 ANSI-labeled tapes?

The long form:

Researchers at CDE have a large number of ANSI labeled tapes created on our
VMS VAXes (since we got the first VAX in 1979).
We are getting more and more UNIX machines (DEC and Sun flavors so far, more
flavors to come).  At this point there is no 9-track tape drive on the UNIX
side of the cluster, though people can transfer data from the drives on the VMS
side with DECnet (and a DECnet clone on the Suns).
I know that UNIX tape utilities are dd and tar. I haven't actually used
them, not having the actual hardware, but have the impression that they go
back to the old unlabeled world of positioning your own tapes and knowing
what's on  them, etc.

What people have become used to is writing ANSI labeled tapes and then doing
directories to check content, dates, size, etc. They can refer to a file in any
procedure with DEVICE:filename (where DEVICE is the real or logical name of the
tape drive), not needing to know its exact position.  Labeling has protected
them from overwriting files (unless they reinitialized the tape) by miscounting
files. Is there anything that will at least READ tapes like this in Unix.  (I
realize that even then we would still have the large problem of reading the
many VMS file formats as vs. only stream-linefeed in Unix. )

Any light you can shed or directions you could point would be greatly
appreciated.

Anne Lightfoot Cooper, Data Librarian, Center for Demography and Ecology
 Data Library, Univerisity of Wisconsin

 cooper@ssc.wisc.edu               cooper@wiscssc.bitnet