Those stupid setld formats!

[Frederick M. Avolio]

In article <1629 at ultb.UUCP> awpsys at ultb.UUCP (Andrew W. Potter) writes:
>
>Does ANYONE know how to simply extract files from those STUPID dec
>setld format files?   

I do.  In the documentation although somewhat buried for the more
esoteric stuff.  See below.

> I need to get some kernal files, and I refuse
>to do the stupid DEC ultrix installation all over from scratch!

And that's your right, Andy, as an American. :-)

The stupid format of the stupid setld tape is documented in the stupid
oops... sorry, got caught up in it all :-). is documented in the
system managers doc set... I am at home so I don't have it in front of 
me, but it is in a section called something like creating 
software subset distributions or something like that.

By the way, I think the setld process and the ability to load and remove
subsets is great (especially when linked to the ability to do this
over a network w/o a tape device) so it'd be great if you would 
submit an spr explaining how you'd do it differently.  I suspect you want two
big tar files with everything.


So before I go into the format of the setld tape, perhaps you don't know
that you can pull off individual SUBSETS (not files from the SUBSETS
though) with the setld command.  It is well documented in the manual pages
so I won't go into it here.  Suffice it to say, that if you just need to
get a certain subset (or to remove a whole subset -- let's say you want
more disk space and you don't need SCCS or Fortran right now, you can
safely remove all the files and restore them easily later) the setld
command is what you're looking for.

But in case you really need to pull out individual files from a tape 
you need to know the format of the setld tape you have.  (The installation
tape.)  Here's roughly the format of the tape (and this is documented and there 
are shell scripts on the system that'd give you this info so I'm not giving
away any secrets):

BOOT (or empty file)	bs=512
SPACE (empty file)	bs=512
ROOT (or empty)		bs=10k
INSTCTRL (tar file -- see note below)  this and all the rest are bs=10k
SUBSET1
SUBSET2
 .
 .
 .

Pull out the INSTCTRL file and untar it into a subdirectory instctrl.
The file ending in .image in that directory tells you what subsets are on the
rest of the tape in what order.  The SUBSET.inv file tells you what files
are on each subset (inv for inventory).  All of the subset files are 
compressed tar files.

Hope this helps.

Fred