Re: [Bug-tar] Reading out the label (and _only_ the label)

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Wouter,

> Unfortunately, the only non-destructive actions that I've found that
> will make tar read out the label and/or exit with a status code if the
> label isn't what I'm giving it, involve reading out the entire archive
> from tape. Since these tapes are rather large and I'm not sure I'll
> find the right label first time around, I'd rather avoid this if at
> all possible.

Can't you use dd(1) to read only a little bit of the tar file and feed
that to tar?

    dd if=/dev/st0 bs=1k count=20 | tar tvf - | ...test label

Cheers,


Ralph.