About reading and writing tape files

Reading or writing tape files involves copying the file from tape to disk or from disk to tape. To perform read or write operations, use one of the UNIX commands that performs input and output operations, for example tar or mt.

Positioning tape files

The mt command positions tape files by skipping forward or backward according to tape marks.

The following options are available on the mt command for positioning tapes:

eof, weof
Writes an end-of-file tape mark at the current position on the tape according to the count option on mt.
fsf, bsf
Spaces forward or backward the number of tape marks on the count option.
fsr, bsr
Spaces forward and backward the number of records according to the count option on mt. bsr is only supported for the undefined record type.

The following example uses the mt command to skip forward three files on a tape:

mt -f tape1 fsf 3

Rewinding tape files

When a file is rewound, it is positioned to the beginning of the data. To rewind a tape file, you can use the mt command.

tape1 is positioned to the beginning of the tape volume that is associated with the file.

The following command rewinds file tape1:

mt -f tape1 rewind

The count option is not used for the rewind operation. If you specify a count, mt ignores it.

About reading and writing tape files

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