Tar (and other?) blocking question

[Andrew Beattie]

In article <752 at n8emr.UUCP> lwv at n8emr.UUCP (Larry W. Virden) writes:
>
>Is there a way that a program could look at a file produced by tar and
>determine what blocking factor was used?  

Sure ...

dd if=/dev/{put_your_tape_device_here} bs=20b count=1 |wc -c

ie: use blocks as big as you can (I never met a device driver that could
handle bigger than 20b), read one block, then see how many characters
were in it.

Divide the number by 512 to get the blocking factor

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| Andrew Beattie                  | Sphinx Limited  |
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| mcvax!ukc!reading!riddle!andrew | Maidenhead      |
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