UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi,

I'm considering a test to see what would happen if I made a hard link (within /dev) to a tape drive (in this case a DAT).

The goal would be to capture data that would have normally been sent to tape into a local file (for use later).

The system is quite old (System V) in this test case.

Basically, I'm wondering if anyone has tried something similar (file mimicking a tape device for capture).

I'm brand new to "www.unix.com" but I've been working on UNIX systems of all kinds for quite some time. However, this unusual idea was put to me recently.

Thank you for any and all ideas and comments.

I doubt...
Tell us more on what type of data?
I have not tried yet (unusual idea..) but if I were to do something of the sort, I would try to use tee command to get a copy of what is being sent to the tape

(I lent years ago my System V 386 (an original AT&T ! V release 2.3 or was it 3.2? ) I wonder what happened to it...)

Hi,

In this case it's AT&T proprietary switching office data (typically enormous blocks of hex). And it would be a compiled executable (not mine) that makes (what they call) the "genbkup" tape.

I would love to do a tee for sure! I'm actually hoping to find some options-file this thing may look for where I could tell it the device is "| tee xxxx > /dev/mt00" instead of plain "mt00" ... or something like that ... still checking into all my options.

What I didn't realize until recently is that if I made this hard link it would be pouring gigabytes into the "/" filesystem which would not have the capacity.

I'm probably wandering on shaky ground so I'm being cautious before I give this a go.