The Ftape Installation 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 end of
file (EOF) mark to the tape. This `EOF
' mark consists simply of
one or more zeroed tar records (data entities of size 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 a
`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).
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