On Tue, Feb 28, 2023 at 6:51 AM Henry Bent <henry.r.bent@gmail.com> wrote:

On Tue, 28 Feb 2023 at 10:45, KenUnix <ken.unix.guy@gmail.com> wrote:
Morning,

I am using enblock to create tap files from tar files.

Was a program ever written to convert tap files to tar files or
a Linux program that could read tap files?

I also see that writing to a tap file from Unix the size increases
when writing multiple files however when writing 1 file to the tap
file "tar cv0 ..." the tap file still remains at its larger size from the
previous larger writes. Is this what is expected?

Thanks,
Ken

Hi Ken,

Questions like this are probably better suited to the SIMH mailing list. https://groups.io/g/simh

That being said, is there a reason you're bothering to convert to tap format? Modern versions of SIMH can do "attach [file] -f tar [device]" to directly attach a tar file to a tape device.

-Henry

Hi, Henry, Ken and TUHS

All of the simh vax tutorials on Gunkies still give instructions to turn all of the tar files (plus things like miniroot) into a single tap file for installation. I don't know if that is the reason that Ken wants to do that, however. If it is, he should look at the mkdisttap.pl utility on those pages.

Ken, there are a couple of other utilities to convert tar files to opensim tap files simtools collection, mksimtape and tar2mt here is the link to the collection: https://github.com/open-simh/simtools/tree/master/converters

If there's a utility to convert tap files to tar files, I'm oblivious to it -sorry.

-Michael