4 ms·
When you're reading the data later, how would you know where to find "the end" if you don't already know the length?
by ikawe 10y ago
When you're reading the data later, how would you know where to find "the end" if you don't already know the length?
- mnarayan01 10y agoYou don't know the end of the data, but presumably(?) you know the end of the tape.
- marcosdumay 10y agoWe are talking past each other here... Making a backup with tar is done by typing something like that on bash: > tar -c - dir1 dir2 dir3 > /dev/tape That will (hopefully, I doubt I got the tar switches right) backup those dirs into the tape (that will actually have a weird name, not '/dev/tape'). Now, in practice Linux doesn't always know the size of a tape you inserted. But this is not the issue, if you accept the seeks needed for that, you'd better write at the beginning anyway.