Finding tape block size

Root Boy Jim rbj at uunet.UU.NET
Thu Feb 28 10:36:37 AEST 1991


In article <15222 at smoke.brl.mil> gwyn at smoke.brl.mil (Doug Gwyn) writes:
>Assuming your tape subsystem conforms to long-established UNIX practice,
>if the read() system call specifies a read count less than the actual
>block size when reading the "raw tape" device (which is the usual one),
>you should get an I/O error since data will be lost.

I agree with everything Doug said. However, I would like to add that
while mtio(4) says that an error will be returned, many device drivers
will not return one. The only source (Tahoe) I have available to look
at (Lions is at home) says things like:

/*
 * If we were reading raw tape and the only error was that the
 * record was too long, then we don't consider this an error.
 */
-- 
		[rbj at uunet 1] stty sane
		unknown mode: sane



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