Note: This program has no attribution for authorship. I modified it to deal with binary files. Bob Supnik Description: backup is a program that can list the contents of, and extract files from a TOPS-10 backup tape. The command syntax is some- what resembling that of tar. The command backup -t[v][f tape] lists the contents of 'tape'. The command backup -x[cdimv8][f tape] file1 file2 ... extracts all files that match either of the file arguments given. The names used for the created files will be the canonical names from the tape, unless -d or -i are in effect. The canonical name is a string of the format: device.p_pn.sfd1.sfd2..file.ext Arguments: 'tape' is the name of a tape drive, the name of a file or the single character '-', meaning stdin. If omitted, the environment variable TAPE will be consulted. If the "tape" argument is actually a file, which was captured from a tape (say, on a different machine). The "known good" way to capture the contents of the tape is to use the unix utility "dd", and a command line something like this: dd if=/dev/rmt0 of=data ibs=2720 obs=2720 conv=block the key thing is that this program expects a fixed block size of 2720 bytes. If the tape actually has some other format, this program probably won't succeed. You can use the unix utility "tcopy" to inspect the contents of the tape. Here's the tcopy output from a good tape: tcopy /dev/rmt0 file 0: block size 2720: 9917 records file 0: eof after 9917 records: 26974240 bytes eot total length: 26974240 bytes File arguments are either any substring of the canonical name printed with 'backup -t ...', or a hash mark, and the number of the file on the tape, or "*" to simply extract all the files. Options: -b Extract files in binary format. The files on tape have one 36b word stored in five 8b frames, as specified in PDP-10 "core dump" mode. The extracted files have one 36b word stored, right justified, on one little-endian 64b word, as expected by the simh simulators. -c The 'tape' is a disk file, in copytape format. -d Create a directory structure when restoring, giving files named device:p_pn/sfd1/sfd2/file.ext, instead of the flat name space resulting from using the canonical names. -f The disk image file is the next argument. -i Ignore device and directory info when building output file names. -m The disk image file has a 4 byte header specifying density, which must be ignored. -v Verbose. Does the obvious. -vv does even more. -8 Tops-10 file was in eight-bit mode. Bugs: We don't handle multiple tape savesets any good. We don't check for bad format of input. We don't handle checksums, or repeated blocks any good.