UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello everyone,

I am having difficulties restoring data from a tape and I was hoping someone could help me. Here it goes.
Whenever I type tar -xvf /dev/nst0, only the first file on the tape is restored which means that in the particular tape there are multiple tar files.

Can someone please tell me how can I extract multiple files from a tape?
Is there a command that can restore multiple tar files from a tape without restoring each file seperately?

Thank you, all

Just found this - they are using mt to position the tape at different points:

http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manu...tion/Many.html

No, I don't know how the files were archived on that tape.
But I am sure, there are more than one files in there because I forwarded the tape using:
mt -f /dev/nst0 fsf 2 and then tar xvf /dev/nst0.
In that case it extracted only the second file on the tape.

If I do mt -f /dev/nst0 fsf 3, then the 3rd file will be extracted.

The problem is that I can't do that for every single file because there are hundreds of them.

If I do tar tvf, it only displays the first file, not everything, that's why I think that the guy who archived it, created more than one tar files.



Can you get the syntax from the one who wrote the multiple tar archives to that tape to get a clue? Also to be sure he could have written them one after one onto the tape instead of overwriting each and having left only one in the end

What does a tar tvf shows only the first file on the tape.? Can you see files from multiple tar archives?

Ah ok. Then I suggest the people that store hundreds of such archives change it to write them all together in one archive to make your work a bit more comfortable, if that is an option.

Also maybe have a while loop for example counting up to 99999 and have it read the archives until an error occurs.
If there is a command to get a clue how many files are on the tape (tctl? mt?), use that number.

A while loop?

Do I have to write a perl script to do that?

Can you please tell me an easy way to do that?
I am not good with scripting.

I just looked around and found this: for a in `ls -1 *.tar.gz`; do tar -zxvf $a; done
but when I run it i got the error:
tar.gz file doesn't exist.