dds2tar(1L)dds2tar(1L)NAMEdds2tar - tool for fast tape access
SYNOPSISdds2tar [ -f device ] [ -t indexfile ] [options] string ...
DESCRIPTIONdds2tar uses an index to find the files with record seek (a fast opera‐
tion 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, com‐
pressed 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 speci‐
fied 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. 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/rmt0, which may be overridden with the envi‐
ronment 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 use‐
ful 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/rmt0 and stor‐
ing 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 contain‐
ing the string "glibc" in filename) from the default tape /dev/rmt0,
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 pro‐
gram 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 stan‐
dard, 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/rmt0. The variable DDS2TAR cat be used to give some options, e.g.
--compress, -z, -s # , -b #.
SEE ALSOdds2index(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 obso‐
lete 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(1L)
