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8.5.3: File marks and tar

There is at least one peculiarity when using the tar program with tape devices. The problem is, that tar writes its own kind-of end of file (EOF) mark to the tape. This `EOF' mark consists simply of one or more zeroed tar records (data entities of 512 bytes). tar stops reading back a backup volume as soon as it finds such a zeroed record. But this also means that tar never reads in the file mark provided by the tape device. This has an effect when extracting more than one volume from a tape cartridge: after tar has completed extracting the first one, one needs to use an `mt -f /dev/tape fsf' to skip to the next volume (where one has to replace `/dev/tape' by the tape device one actually uses).

Just to make it clear: this is totally unrelated to ftape but a feature of tar. The same applies to all kinds of tape devices available for Linux.


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