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Date:      Fri, 08 Jan 1999 21:29:40 -0700
From:      "Aaron D. Gifford" <agifford@infowest.com>
To:        questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Why won\'t TAR cooperate\?
Message-ID:  <3696DB34.29D87B41@infowest.com>
References:  <199901070249.TAA02192@infowest.com> <19990107190309.446.qmail@alice.gba.oz.au>

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Greg Black wrote:
<<snip>>
> Try it with dd to ensure that you can read the file and write
> the whole thing to the tape:
> 
>     dd if=big_file obs=64k of=/dev/tape_device
> 
> --
> Greg Black <gjb@acm.org>

Thanks, dd in fact worked perfectly.  I even used tar and piped the
output of tar to dd and that worked:

  # tar --create --file - really_big_file | dd of=/dev/nrst0 obs=65536
  65575+1 records in
  65575+1 records out
  4297551657 bytes transferred in 982.901416 secs (4372312 bytes/sec)
  # mt -f /dev/nrst0 weof
  # mt -f /dev/nrst0 rewind
  # dd if=/dev/nrst0 obs=65536 of=really_big_file2
  65575+1 records in
  65575+1 records out
  4297551657 bytes transferred in 1319.829718 secs (3256141 bytes/sec)
  # diff --brief --report-identical-files really_big_file and
really_big_file
  Files really_big_file and really_big_file2 are identical

It still puzzles me that tar when used alone always stopped at the same
spot every time I tried it.  I've used tar just fine on other huge files
saved to HD instead of tape, but try as I might, tar would not write the
large file to my tape.  The only supposition I can fathom at this point
is that tar believed that the tape was shorter than it really was.

Oh, I did forget to mention in my second post that I'm running
2.2.8-RELEASE/STABLE (RELEASE user land and STABLE kernel).

Kevin Street wrote:
>Do the login.conf filesize settings apply to tapes?  What does `limits'
>say yours is set to?

Hmmm, once I 'su' to root (which I did) would this matter?

Aaron out.

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