TCOPY(1) BSD General Commands Manual TCOPY(1)NAMEtcopy — copy and/or verify mag tapes
SYNOPSIStcopy [-cvx] [-s maxblk] [src [dest]]
DESCRIPTION
The tcopy utility is designed to copy magnetic tapes. The only assump‐
tion made about the tape is that there are two tape marks at the end.
The tcopy utility with only a source tape (/dev/rsa0 by default) speci‐
fied will print information about the sizes of records and tape files.
If a destination is specified a copy will be made of the source tape.
The blocking on the destination tape will be identical to that used on
the source tape. Copying a tape will yield the same output as if just
printing the sizes.
Options:
-c Copy src to dest and then verify that the two tapes are identi‐
cal.
-s maxblk
Specify a maximum block size, maxblk.
-v Given the two tapes, src and dest verify that they are identi‐
cal.
-x Output all informational messages to the standard error. This
option is useful when dest is /dev/stdout.
SEE ALSOmtio(4)HISTORY
The tcopy command appeared in 4.3BSD.
BUGS
Writing an image of a tape to a file does not preserve much more than the
raw data. Block size(s) and tape EOF marks are lost which would other‐
wise be preserved in a tape-to-tape copy.
EOD is determined by two sequential EOF marks with no data between.
There are old systems which typically wrote three EOF's between tape
files. tcopy will erroneously stop copying early in this case.
When using the copy/verify option -ctcopy does not rewind the tapes
prior to start. A rewind is performed after writing prior to the verifi‐
cation stage. If one doesn't start at BOT then the comparison may not be
of the intended data.
BSD April 17, 1994 BSD
