[Info-vax] Unexpected error using ZIP for OpenVMS

[Paul Sture]

On Wed, 28 Dec 2011 18:10:43 -0800, AEF wrote:

> On Dec 28, 9:04 pm, AEF <spamsink2... at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> On Dec 28, 1:30 am, Steven Schweda <sms.antin... at gmail.com> wrote:
> [...]
>> Oh, another limit: VMS backup block sizes, and two different ones: one
>> on tape and a smaller one on disk! 65535 and 32767. This led Carl
>> Lydick to always warn people not to use block sizes higher than what
>> could be on disk so that copying a save set to disk wouldn't break it.
>> And if you exceed the limits you should expect problems!
>>
>>
> Actually I believe the limit on disk is effectively 32256.
> 
> Sorry for the goof.
> 

Tip. If you get brain fade and can't remember that number, give BACKUP 
32000, and it will work it out itself.

I suppose there's no guarantee that this behaviour will remain in future 
versions of BACKUP, but it's worked ever since I first started using 
TK70s.  (IIRC there was a hardware constraint with the combination of 
TK50 and VAXstationn 2000 which set the limit at 16K.)


-- 
Paul Sture