[TUHS] why does tar have the tape device hard coded into it and why is it mt1 instead of mt0

[will.senn@gmail.com (Will Senn)]

All,

In my exploration of v6, I followed the advice in "Setting up Unix - 
Seventh Edition" and copied v6tar from v7 to v6. Life is good. However, 
tar is using mt1 and it is hard coded into the source, tar.c:
char    magtape[]       = "/dev/mt1";

As the subject line suggested, I have two questions for those of you who 
might know:

1. Why is it hard coded?
2. Why is it the second device and not the first?

Interestingly, it took me a little while to figure out it was doing this 
because I didn't actually move files between v6 and v7 until today. 
Before this my tests had been limited to separate tests on v6 and v7 
along the lines of:

cd /wherever
tar c .
followed by
tar t
list of files
cd /elsewhere
tar x
files extracted and matching

What it was doing was writing to the non-existant /dev/mt1, which it 
then created, tarring up stuff, and exiting. Then when I listed the 
contents of the tarfile, or extracted the contents, it was successful. 
But, when I went to move the tape between v6 and v7, the tape (mt0) was 
blank, of course. It was at this point that I followed  Noel's advice 
and "Used the source", and figured out that it was hard-coded as you see 
above.

Thanks,

Will