UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Hi,
I' using a sun solaris server, I would like to known if there is the possibility to control how many space is free on a tape and how I can delete a single file on a tape.
Thanks
DOMENICO

Tapes aren't hard drives. The very concept of "delete" and "free space" assumes the existence of some sort of filesystem to organize sectors, which tapes often don't bother with since they seek so slowly... Instead they'd be used as one big file, containing an archive like tar. There's exceptions, of course, but I can't tell if your tape's one of them from the precisely zero information given here. I'd guess that you'll need to deal with the program that created the tape data, not the tape itself.

thanks for the suggestion...
but you can say me why when I write on a tape for two or three times, after when I give the command tar tvf /dev/rmt/0, I see only the last files written?

Because you're not telling tar to append. You're overwriting the tape every time, starting at the beginning of the tape and writing towards the end. It's like overwriting the same file every time.

You're archiving with something like 'tar -cf /dev/rmt/0', yes? That creates a new archive every time, overwriting the parts you've already saved to. 'tar -rf /dev/rmt/0' will append to an existing archive. See 'man tar' for details.

here is a google groups thread describing the process.