Greetings, O Knowledgable Ones I am trying to read DAT's (produced on our HP9000), with tar on the HP3000. (Why? because I want to throw the HP9000 away) The DAT's were written by tar as multiple blocks, i.e. 250 subdirectories, each one holding 100 files. So, I need to seek to a specific tape mark (subdirectory), then tell /bin/tar to -xvf a certain file. So far I have mknod'ed the device as follows mknod "/dev/tape70" 0 70 and tar -tvf /dev/tape70 shows me the first block of 100 records. I am writing a C program to seek to any block, so that tar can search that block for the file I want. ----------------------------------------------------------- if ((dat=open("/dev/tape70", O_RDONLY) ) == NULL) { printf("Error opening device!\n"); return(1); } /* printf("Read %d", read(dat,&buffer,20)); printf("Read %s", buffer); */ fcomm=7; fitem=0; for (i=0; i<200; i++) FCONTROL(dat,fcomm,&fitem); close(dat); return(0); ----------------------------------------------------------------------- The seek from FCONTROL seems to pause between blocks, and then rewinds at the end. Any help appreciated. Thanks Neil [log in to unmask]