So I've dusted off an old DLT drive to recover some old data. I have three archives spanned across nine tapes. If I try to tar tvf the tape to see what's on it, I can only see the first tape of each archive. The second and third don't give me anything back (well, actually, they give back a directory checksum error).

Is there a special command I have to give to tar to tell it there's another tape coming, or that if I'm not tape 2 that it's part of a larger archive?

This is on a SGI, btw, (running IRIX6.5 I believe). Is it possible that this version of tar doesn't support multiple tapes?

the command I'm using is pretty simple:

tar tvf /dev/tape

Thanks

Check the man page for tar. There are three addidional options you can specify on the command line: -M (or --multi-volume), -L (or --tape-length=<N*1024 bytes>), and --new-volume-script=<filename>, where filename is a script which tells tar what to do when it reaches the end of a tape; namely, execute a ctrl-Z (to suspend the operation) and unmount so that you can change tape, then remount manually, and finally command fg to bring it back to foreground and resume.

Can't help you with the script though. Never figured it out.

hmm.. the SGI's tar doesn't have those options. It also doesn't have a compiler, so I can't make a new tar... hmmm...