Provided by: dds2tar_2.5.2-5_amd64 bug

NAME

       dds2tar - tool for fast tape access

SYNOPSIS

       dds2tar [ -f device ] [ -t indexfile ] [options] string ...

DESCRIPTION

       dds2tar  uses  an  index  to  find  the  files  with  record seek (a fast operation of DAT
       devices).  Since the file structure of the tape archives is used to extract the files, the
       archive has to be created by tar, compressed only by (the transparent signal processor of)
       the device.  So you can step through the archive very  quickly  and  extract  files.   The
       index  may  be created using dds2index or tar-vRt and is normally stored as a file on your
       hard disk.

       A tar archive is a sequence of blocks (e.g. 10240 bytes by default), each  containing  the
       same  number (20 by default) of records, 512 byte each.  dds2tar reads the tape and writes
       the tar records of the specified files (that means the header record and the data  records
       of  each  selected  file)  to stdout.  You may pipe the dds2tar output to the stdin of tar
       -xvvf - to restore the files to your disk.   (See  EXAMPLES  below.)   Before  a  file  is
       extracted, the records of parent directories of the file are also written to stdout.

       The  index  of  the archive should contain enough information to compute the number of the
       block containing the header of each selected file.  dds2index will give such a table,  tar
       -Rvt  e.g.  will  not  (only  record  numbers  are  listed).   A patch for GNU tar-1.12 is
       available, adding the option --record-file.  This patch is not included in the version  of
       tar  that  ships  with  Debian.   Alternatively  there  are some tricks to get the missing
       information.

       The strings are regular expressions to select the files.  The matching  algorithm  is  the
       one  from GNU tar. If the option -l is given, the matched file names are printed to stdout
       (You may not pipe this list of pathnames to tar!).

       The default device is /dev/nst0, which may be overridden  with  the  environment  variable
       TAPE, which in turn may be overridden with the -f device option. The device must be a SCSI
       tape device.

OPTIONS

       -f devicefile Device of the tape archive. Must be a SCSI tape device.

       -t indexfile
              Specifies the index file (default is stdin).

       -s #   Set the number of the first tape block of the archive. This option is  useful  only
              if  the  index file contains the verbose output of tar -Rvt.  Any information about
              the first block inside the index file will be overridden by  this  option.   If  no
              information  is available, the archive has to be the first file of the tape. If you
              have positioned your tape at the first block of the archive, you can use

              dds2tar `mt-dds` -t index ... | tar -f - ...

              to complete the information of the output of tar -Rvt stored in the index file.

       -b #   Set the blocksize of the archive (tar -b #). This option  is  useful  only  if  the
              index  file  contains  the  verbose output of tar (or if you have problems with the
              size of the internal buffer of  dds2tar).   Any  information  about  the  blocksize
              inside  the  index  file  will  be overridden by this option.  If no information is
              available, the default blocksize of tar is used.

       -z     The index file should be read and stored in compressed mode.

OPTIONS you didn't really need

       --z, --no-compress
              Don't filter the archive file through gzip.

       -q, --quick
              Don't extract the parent directories of the selected  objects  from  tape.   --body
              Write  only the first selected file to stdout. This is useful if you want to read a
              file or extract an archive which is part of the current archive.

       -v,--verbose
              verbose mode.

       --hash-mode
              Print a hash sign for each MB.

       -V,--version
              Print only the Version Number to stderr.

       -l     Don't access the tape but print the file names to stdout.  You may  not  pipe  this
              list of pathnames into tar.

       --extract
              The  stdout  is  closed and opened by a pipe to the command tar -fxb - 1 .  You may
              find this option convenient, I like to pipe the output to tar by hand.

EXAMPLES

       Example of getting the index from the default  tape  /dev/nst0  and  storing  it  in  file
       archive.idx:

              dds2index -t archive.idx

       Alternatively  you  can  use  a  patched version of tar to create an index file.  With the
       patch you can direct the errors and warning to stdout and the index information  including
       information about the blocksize and the number of the first block to a file:

              tar -t --record-file archive.idx

       If  the  archive is the first file of the tape and the blocksize is the default of 20, you
       can use the verbose output of tar (-Rv) as an index file.

              tar -t -v -R | tee archive.idx

       If the archive is not the first file  of  the  tape,  you  can  store  all  the  necessary
       information inside the index file with the use of mt-dds and tar :

              mt asf ...
              mt-dds tell > archive.idx
              tar -tvR >>archive.idx

       Example  of  using  dds2tar  to  extract  the gnu library (all files containing the string
       "glibc" in filename) from the default tape /dev/nst0, using the  previously  stored  index
       file archive.idx:

              dds2tar -t archive.idx '*glibc*' | tar xvvf -

       To  see  in  advance  what  would  happen in the previous command without actually writing
       anything to your disk, you may use:

              dds2tar -t archive.idx '*glibc*' | tar tvvf -

       Example of checking the matches. You may try:

              dds2tar -t archive.idx -l '*glibc*'

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

   tapes
       A tape device handles all I/O (read, write, seek) in units of tape records.  The bigger  a
       tape  record,  the  more  effective  usually  is the access (and the less gaps are on QIC-
       tapes).  However, normally a program will only read or write complete tape records.

       Normal tape drives allow to seek only relative to  the  current  position.  However,  some
       newer  SCSI-2  tapes, i.e. DAT, conforming to the DDS standard, keep track of the absolute
       position on the tape by inserting the tape record number inside each track.   This  number
       can be read while the fast seek is performed.

       The  tar(1)  program  uses  a  slightly  different terminology.  It calls tape blocks what
       normally is called tape records.  In the following sections we use the tar terminology  to
       avoid confusion.

   tar
       The  unit  inside  a  tar  archive is a tar record with a fixed length of 512 bytes. Every
       file, directory or soft link will occupy at least one  tar  record  of  information  about
       pathname, permission information and so on called header record.  The data of each file is
       stored in additional tar records directly after the header record of that file.

       tar reports the tar record number of every header  record  in  the  archive  with  its  -R
       option.   tar  counts the records continuously, starting with 0 (if invoked as tar -tR) or
       with 1 (if invoked as tar -cR).

       tar handles multiple records as a tar block, mainly to make the access of tapes (or disks)
       more  efficient (and save tape space of QIC-tapes).  tar only writes and reads full blocks
       to or from an archive.  The -b option of tar controls, how many records are in one  block.
       The  default  number  of  records  per block is 20.  This number is usually called the tar
       block size.  However, this term is a little bit confusing, since  it  does  not  mean  the
       number of bytes in a block.  Thus a perhaps better name would be the tar blocking factor.

   tar on tapes
       tar  writes or reads its archive to or from tape in units of tar blocks.  As stated above,
       only a complete tape block may be transferred to/from tape.  To  extract  a  specific  tar
       block  from  tape,  one  has  to  read  an entire tape block into a buffer and extract the
       specified tar record from the buffer manually.  If you would like to  read  a  tar  record
       with  a  given  number, you have to know the number of the first tape block of the archive
       and the tar block size to compute the number of the tape  block  witch  contains  the  tar
       record  to  read.  If the tar archive is the first file on the tape, the tape block number
       is the equal to the tar block number.

       Example: A file with the tar record number 1234 (records start with 0) may be found  in  a
       tape  tar archive, written with a blocking factor of 20.  It may be found in the tar block
       with the number
                       blk = (int) 1234/20 = (int) 61.7 = 61
       which is also the tape block number.  The requested file is within this tar block  at  the
       record offset
                       rec = 1234-(61*20) = 14
       in 512 byte units.

       If  a current archive is not the first archive on the tape, then the number of tape blocks
       of all previous archives has to be added to the block number computed above,  to  get  the
       current  tape  block  number.  The number of previous tape records should be obtained from
       DDS devices when the tape is positioned at the beginning of the current archive  (use  mt-
       dds without arguments for example).

       Example:  Assuming  the  archive in the above example to be the second file on a tape, and
       the archive starts at tape block 20222.  Then we will find our file with tar record number
       1234 in the tape block
                       tblk = 20222 + (int) 1234/20 = 20283
       on the tape.  The record offset inside the tape block will be the same as above.

WARNING

       This  program  can only read records (tar is calling them tape blocks) up to 32 kbytes due
       to the limitations of the Linux device driver.  The extracted archive is written to stdout
       with a block size of 512 bytes.

ENVIRONMENT

       The  environment  variable TAPE overrides the default tape device /dev/nst0.  The variable
       DDS2TAR cat be used to give some options, e.g.  --compress, -z, -s # , -b #.

SEE ALSO

       dds2index(1), mt(1), mt-dds(1), tar(1)

HISTORY

       This program was created to use the fast seek operation of my DAT streamer. The tapes  are
       called  dds (digital data storage).  Since the program will write a tar archive to stdout,
       I called this program dds2tar.  If I created the index file, I'm now  able  to  restore  a
       file of 1MB within one minute even if the tape contains more than 2GB of data.

       Thanks  to  Andreas (Andreas_Bagge@h2.maus.de), who has written a nice manual page for the
       overloaded version 1.1.3 of the program dds2tar (I added  too  much  features  ...  )  His
       manual  page  for dds2tar-1.1.3 gave me the idea how to split the program dds2tar into the
       peaces dds2tar, dds2index and mt-dds.  Additionally his manual page was the starting point
       for this page.

       Since  the  version 2.2 has a very robust algorithm to read the index file and the ability
       of pattern matching, a lot of options where obsolete and has been deleted. I tried to make
       dds2tar as simple I can.

AUTHOR

       J"org  Weule  (weule@cs.uni-duesseldorf.de),  Phone  +49  211  751409.   This  software is
       available            at            ftp.uni-duesseldorf.de:/pub/unix/apollo             and
       sunsite.unc.edu:/pub/Linux/system/Backup

                                               2.3                                     dds2tar(1)