Copying Xenix files to DOS ?

[Earl H. Kinmonth]

In article <425 at wa3wbu.UUCP> john at wa3wbu.UUCP (John Gayman) writes:
>
>   I'm not real familiar with Xenix. I've been using Microport Unix for
>several years. Can anyone tell me if Xenix has DOS interface tools to
>enable copying text/binary files from Xenix to a DOS-format diskette ?

I have SCO 286 Xenix.  It has a reasonably complete set of utilities for
bidirectional copying between Xenix and MSDOS, not only to floppies but
also to a MSDOS hard disk partition.

The only problems I've noted in heavy usage are: (a) the dosformat does
not support all common MSDOS formats (no 1.44 meg, for example) and (b)
copies from Xenix -> MSDOS on the same hard disk are ridiculously slow
(MSDOS -> Xenix is much faster); (c) on rare occasions the doscp command
insists on copying into bad tracks on the MSDOS partition.

The copy utilities have line conversion options.

>I need to copy some shell scripts to a floppy and then view/edit the
>files under DOS. Can anyone lend any pointers ?  Also, if I dumped
>some files to a high density diskette with say, cpio... could I read that
>diskette on my Microport system ?  I've never tried exchanging cpio
>floppies between systems before.

Not having a copy of Microport ~Chapter 11~ Unix, I cannot speak to the
last question.  In any event tar is usually a better choice than cpio.
I can provide a version of tar that runs under **IX and MSDOS.  I have
run SCO Xenix cpio disks to MSDOS using the cpio that comes with the MKS
Toolkit.  After producing a tar that runs under MSDOS, I stopped using cpio.

For more information:

Earl H. Kinmonth
History Department
University of California, Davis
Davis, California  95616
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