Announcement: vtapeutils 0.1

Version 0.1 of vtapeutils is available from the Sourceforge project page at

vtapeutils is intended to ba a package of utilities to work with virtual tape files. Although the current program is not structured this way, the planned design is to implement the routines to access virtual tapes as a library which can be invoked from utility programs. This library contains routines to work with each tape format, as well as an interface layer that insulates the calling program fron the details of the format.

There are currently two utilities in the package. vtapecp copies one virtual tape to another, performing format conversion in the process if requested. vtapelist lists the structure of a virtual tape, including number of files and maximum and minimum blocksizes of each file. The next version will also list the contents of ANSI standard labels.

Three formats are currently supported: AWSTAPE, used in the IBM world; TAP, used by the SIMH and E11 emulators; and TPC, used for the DECUS tape archive. At present, the utilities buttume that the tape file is named with a file extension denotin its format (.aws, .tap, and .tpc, respectively); later versions will automagically guess the format of an input tape, if possible. (This should be possible for AWSTAPE and TAP, but not TPC.) Other formats can be supported by writing the necessary routines.

The package is licensed under the new BSD license, so it may be freely used by all for any purpose.

Questions, comments, bug reports, coode contributions, etc. may be directed to me by email.