mt-dds(1L)

NAME
mt-dds - tool to control a dds device.

SYNOPSIS
mt-dds comp-on|comp-off|comp-query|comp-log
mt-dds < tell|label > [ -b # ]

DESCRIPTION
mt-dds controls the compression mode of dds tape devices (DAT).

mt-dds may also report the current tape position in absolute records (relative to begin of tape) in a format that may be used later by dds2tar(1) to access tar archives that are not the first file on tape.

The default device is /dev/tape, which may be overridden with the environment variable TAPE, which in turn may be overridden with the -f device option. The device must be a character special file.

OPTIONS

  DDS tape device control options

comp-on
    Enable the hardware compression mode if supported by the device.

comp-off
    Disable the compression mode, switch to normal mode.

comp-query
    Print to stderr if compression mode currently is disabled or enabled. A 0 means compression is disabled, a 1 means compression in enabled.

comp-log
    Print to stdout four lines of information about transferred kilobytes before and after hardware compression from and to the device since initialization.

  dds2tar service functions

tell
    Print three lines with the current tape position, a block size value (20 by default, may be overridden with -b option) and a block length value (blocksize*512) to stdout. If this output is redirected to a location file locfile, this file may be used by dds2tar(1) to access archives on tape.

label
    If the current tape position is the beginning of an archive and the archive is labeled, mt-dds writes the label to stdout and moves the tape back to the current position (or back over the filemark).

ts  If the current tape position is the beginning of an archive and the archive is labeled, mt-dds writes the timestamp in octal format to stdout and moves the tape back to the current position (or back over the filemark). If you are using only one computer, the timestamp can be used as a unique archive identifier.

-b #
    Specify the block size # value that is used as a default for the written value with the mt-dds tell command (see above). Also the internal buffer size is specified with this option which is used to read one block in order to get the block size of the current tape block. So specify the block size of the archive or a larger number.

  other options

-f device
    Device of the tape archive (default is /dev/tape). Must be a character special file connected to a dds tape device.

-V,--version
    Print the version number of mt-dds to stderr and exit immediately.

--help
    print some screens of online help with examples through a pager and exit immediately.

EXAMPLES
Example 1: checking the compression mode of the default tape device
    mt-dds comp-query

Example 2: Write the location information as dds2tar command line options to stdout.
    mt-dds

ENVIRONMENT
The environment variable TAPE overrides the default tape device /dev/tape.

PAGER
    The environment variable PAGER overrides the builtin pager command ("/bin/more") to display the output of the --help option.

SEE ALSO
dds2tar(1), dds2index(1), mt(1), tar(1)

HISTORY
This program was created to use it in conjunction with dds2tar.

AUTHOR
J"org Weule (weule@cs.uni-duesseldorf.de), Phone +49 211 751409. This software is available at ftp.uni-duesseldorf.de:/pub/unix/apollo