The Ftape Installation and Usage Guide - File marks
tar
There is at least one peculiarity when using the tar program with
tape devices. The problem is, that tar writes its own kind-of
end of file (EOF) mark to the tape. This `EOF' mark consists
simply of one or more zeroed tar records (data entities of 512
bytes). tar stops reading back a backup volume as soon as it
finds such a zeroed record. But this also means that tar never
reads in the file mark provided by the tape device. This has an effect
when extracting more than one volume from a tape cartridge: after
tar has completed extracting the first one, one needs to use an
`mt -f /dev/tape fsf' to skip to the next volume (where one has to
replace `/dev/tape' by the tape device one actually uses).
Just to make it clear: this is totally unrelated to ftape but a
feature of tar. The same applies to all kinds of tape devices
available for Linux.
![]() |
Use these buttons to jump to the top menu |