SCSItape
SCSItape
Introduction
Tape Basics
User's Manual
Programmer's Manual
Glossary
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Introduction
SCSItape is a BeOS driver for SCSI-2 sequential-access devices, with emphasis on UNIX compatibility. What does that mean?
BeOS Driver
The driver was written for the BeOS, from scratch. Although several tape drivers already existed at the time of writing, none of them did exactly what I wanted (in particular, none worked with my DDS-2 drive ;-). So I wrote another one.
SCSI-2
The driver assumes that it will handle devices which comply with the SCSI-2 standard. No effort was spent to ensure that it would be usable with older drives.
Sequential Access
The SCSI-2 standard lumps tape drives under the general heading "sequential-access devices." The main difference between these and disks is that it takes a long time to access widely separated parts of a tape, and so they are usually read and/or written in a sequential fashion. The SCSItape driver doesn't directly support any other kind of use (although it provides positioning commands).
UNIX Compatibility
The behavior of the driver was modeled on several UNIX (or UNIX-like) systems, in particular HP-UX and FreeBSD/OpenBSD.
The driver documentation has been split into several parts:
  • The section on Tape Basics contains an introduction to using tapes, and to their little peculiarities.
  • The User's Manual describes how to use the driver in conjunction with existing programs. It also documents the tape control program, mt.
  • The Programmer's Manual documents the behavior of the driver's exported functions, in sickening detail.
  • The Glossary explains some tape-related terms and abbreviations used in this manual.

Copyright © 1998 Jens Kilian. This file may be distributed under the conditions of the GNU General Public License.
Be is a registered trademark and BeOS is a trademark of Be, Inc. UNIX is a registered trademark in the United States and other countries, exclusively licensed through X/Open Company, Ltd.
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. - William Shakespeare
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