ANSI standard label creation

[Elena Leontieva]

Hello,

I need to find out how to create an ANSI standard label on the tape on HP-UX. The label should have three records: VOL1 - in record 1, HDR1 - in record 2 and HDR2 - in record 3. Each record is 80 bytes ( according to the standard). Tape should be fixed block, specific densilty (37871 bpi ?) and EBCDIC format. No backup sw is involved, - we need to put some files using dd command on the tape and label it. This is for IRS.

Any ideas or hints?

Thanks in advance.
Elena.

[James A. Donovan · Accepted solution]

Solaris has the ansitape command. I found the source code for ansitape here:

http://sources.isc.org/utils/backup/ansitape.txt

and a (google-cached) man page for the ansitape utility...

http://216.239.57.104/search?q=cache:joUqcJ369UQJ:sunsite.ccu.edu.tw/pub8/sunsite/freeware/forsunsites/ansitape.html+ansitape&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

[Bill Hassell]

Welcome to the world of mainframe tape formats...completely foreign to HP-UX. HP-UX has nothing at the command level that can create ANSI standard tapes. dd can be used to accept the ANSI header information from a text file and you can use dd to force an 80 byte record. dd is the only utility that has EBCDIC/ASCII conversion built-in.

NOTE: An ANSI standard tape consists of the VOL1 record (once for the whole tape), then HDR1/2/3 records for *each* file. And depending on how tolerant the IRS mainframe is about the complete tape standard, you may need trailer (EOF) records before creating the tape mark (aka, file separator), and finally two tapemarks after the last file. The format is not too complicated but there are many parts to it so I would get a copy of the spec. Here is a good reference:

http://oscinfo.osc.edu:8080/dynaweb/all/2051_2.0.2/@Generic__BookTextView/904

Finally, density has no meaning for today's tapes. 1/2" reel-to-reel tapes (which are very difficult to find on new computers) had various density settings such as 200, 555, 800, 1600, etc) but DDS and DLT drives have only one density with optional compression. I've not heard about a tape that has 37,871 bpi capability. That requirement may be a showstopper if it is some specialized tape device.

[Elena Leontieva]

Hi,

I wonder if anybody compiled successfully ansitape on HP-UX?

Elena.

[James A. Donovan]

I was able to compile the ansitape source without error using gcc 3.2 under HP-UX 11.11, but I have no way to test it.