billb@amcad.UUCP (02/11/87)
Hello, We have a Burroughs XE-550 running CENTIX (System V) and have been unable to read tapes created with tar on a VAX BSD 4.3 system. A couple of months ago, a public domain version of tar was posted on the net. I compiled this but was still unable to read these VAX BSD 4.3 tapes. The only thing I can think to do now is to use the pd tar program to create the tape on the VAX. Maybe I will then be able to read it. One other thing. We could successfully unpack a tar archive created under BSD 4.3 and sent via uucp with our System V tar. Thanks in advance. Bill Burton UUCP: ...!seismo!husc6!amcad!billb
gwyn@brl-smoke.UUCP (02/14/87)
In article <109@amcad.UUCP> billb@amcad.UUCP (Bill Burton) writes: > We have a Burroughs XE-550 running CENTIX (System V) and have >been unable to read tapes created with tar on a VAX BSD 4.3 system. > One other thing. We could successfully unpack a tar archive >created under BSD 4.3 and sent via uucp with our System V tar. This makes it sound like the problem is in the magtape blocking. Either your magtape drive can't handle the large blocksize used (typically 10240 bytes per block), or your "tar" gets confused by whatever blocksize it finds. Older System V "tar"s are known to have this problem. Two alternative methods: (1) supply an explicit "b" option, as in "tar xbf 20 /dev/rmt0", or (2) use "dd" to buffer the tape blocking, as in "dd if=/dev/rmt0 ibs=20b|tar xf -".