[Info-vax] Copying VMS SaveSet Under Windows

[Bob Eager]

On Sun, 21 Nov 2010 19:05:20 -0500, Richard B. Gilbert wrote:

> The basic problem with Unix is that it lacks the concept of "records".
> To Unix, the world is just a string of bytes.  Records are a figment of
> YOUR imagination and finding and interpreting them is YOUR problem.

Not quite. It is able to differentiate between tape blocks, and between 
data and tape marks. That is all that is needed to clone a real tape into 
a SIMH 'tape file'.

If you issue a sufficiently large read (> max block size expected) on a 
tape device in UNIX, it'll return a buffer with the contents of the next 
block, and it'll tell you how many bytes there are in that buffer. Or, 
it'll return a status value saying that it encountered a tape mark.



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