SCO 2.2.1 tar question

[Dominick Samperi]

In article <100 at pigs.UUCP> you write:
|> In article <8WQW5Ky00Vs8MSNUQN at andrew.cmu.edu> jl42+ at andrew.cmu.edu (Jay Mathew Libove) writes:
|> | Hi. I'm running SCO Xenix SysV/286 v2.2.1 on an IBM PC/AT clone and
|> | I want to tar off a filesystem as:
|> | 
|> | % tar cf - /pathname | compress | tar cfk /dev/rfd096ds9 720 -
|> | 
|> | but when I do this I get:
|> | 
|> | tar: blocksize must be a multiple of 2.
|
|first off, last time i checked there was no 96 tpi 9 sector device.  the
|only 96 tpi device was 15 sectored.

This is the driver for 720K formatted, DD floppies, where there ARE 9
sectors per track.

The only way to do what you want (short of modifying the tar source) is:
tar cvf /tmp/whatever /pathname 
compress /tmp/whatever
tar cvf /dev/rfd096ds9 /tmp/whatever.Z

Alternatively, you could use one tar, compress, and dd, in a pipeline
something like:
tar cvf - /pathname | compress | dd of=/dev/rfd096ds9
(you may need to supply a few more dd switches to get this to work
properly, and efficiently).

---
Dominick Samperi, Manhattan College, NYC
    manhat!samperi at NYU.EDU           ihnp4!rutgers!nyu.edu!manhat!samperi
    philabs!cmcl2!manhat!samperi     ihnp4!rutgers!hombre!samperi
              (^ that's an ell)      uunet!swlabs!mancol!samperi