Shell Programming and Scripting

I have lots of tapes where files got written to X amount of positions per tape.

Is there a way to restore all files on the tape regardless of position ID?

Right now to restore files in the first position I do

Code:

mt -f /dev/nst0 fsf 1
tar -xvf /dev/nst0

I'd really like if there was a script or a command to either loop through all position ID's or simply restore the whole tape. Some tapes appear to have 300+ position ID's.

Thanks for any assistance.

Unfortunately, your method is the safest way. The problem though is the fsf command. So, you can search forward, but I know with many tape drives, you have to go forward, back and then read.

You can put things into a loop for sure, but obviously it will take time.

What happens if you don't use mt and just do tar. Also...some tape control options are based on how you specify your device file, for example on aix rmt0 and rmt0.1 are the same device...see
Rmt0.1 | World is Welcome To The World of Unix!!!

Try this, assumption is that mt returns non-zero when no more positions left on tape.

Code:

echo "Rewinding tape"
mt -f /dev/nst0 rewind
pos=0
while mt -f /dev/nst0 fsf 1
do
   let pos=pos+1
   echo "Extracting from tape position $pos"
   tar -xvf /dev/nst0
done
echo "Rewinding tape"
mt -f /dev/nst0 rewind