[TUHS] Re: Unix V7 enblock.c

[Michael Huff <mphuff@gmail.com>]

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On Tue, Feb 28, 2023 at 6:51 AM Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 28 Feb 2023 at 10:45, KenUnix <ken.unix.guy@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Morning,
>>
>> I am using enblock to create tap files from tar files.
>>
>> Was a program ever written to convert tap files to tar files or
>> a Linux program that could read tap files?
>>
>> I also see that writing to a tap file from Unix the size increases
>> when writing multiple files however when writing 1 file to the tap
>> file "tar cv0 ..." the tap file still remains at its larger size from the
>> previous larger writes. Is this what is expected?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Ken
>>
>
> Hi Ken,
>
> Questions like this are probably better suited to the SIMH mailing list.
> https://groups.io/g/simh
>
> That being said, is there a reason you're bothering to convert to tap
> format?  Modern versions of SIMH can do "attach [file] -f tar [device]" to
> directly attach a tar file to a tape device.
>
> -Henry
>

Hi, Henry, Ken and TUHS

All of the simh vax tutorials on Gunkies still give instructions to turn
all of the tar files (plus things like miniroot) into a single tap file for
installation. I don't know if that is the reason that Ken wants to do that,
however. If it is, he should look at the mkdisttap.pl utility on those
pages.

Ken, there are a couple of other utilities to convert tar files to opensim
tap files simtools collection, mksimtape and tar2mt here is the link to the
collection: https://github.com/open-simh/simtools/tree/master/converters

If there's a utility to convert tap files to tar files, I'm oblivious to it
-sorry.

-Michael

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