FCOPY Reference Manual (32212-90008)

44 Chapter3

FCOPY Applications and Examples

Copying Foreign Tapes

Tapes written on foreign machines often have to be read on HP 3000 systems. If you don't

know the exact data format, here are some ideas that might help you determine what it is.

1. Mount the tape on your HP 3000 (without a write ring). The automatic volume

recognition message tells you if it is labeled, and if so, what the label is. If the tape is

ANSI-labeled, the character data is probably in ASCII, but if the tape is IBM-labeled,

the character data is almost certainly in EBCDIC.

2. Use FCOPY to dump one or two blocks of data from the tape. If the data is likely to be

EBCDIC characters, then use EBCDICIN. For example, if the tape was reported as "Vol

000001,IBM", you could do this:

FILE L;DEV=TAPE;LABEL=000001,IBM;REC=-16384,1,U,ASCII

FILE LP;DEV=LP

FCOPY FROM=*L;TO=*LP;OCTAL;CHAR;EBCDICIN;SUBSET=,1

This reads one block from the tape, converts it to ASCII, formats it as both octal and

characters, and prints it, telling you how big it is. The tape records may be blocked, and

examination of the data will probably disclose a pattern of repetitions from which the

blocking factor can be deduced. This is necessary more often with unlabeled tapes or

IBM-format labeled tapes, which may not have the HDR2 records that give the record

and block size.

3. Once you know the format of the data, use FCOPY to copy the data to where you want

it--for example, to disk. Suppose that the above tape is found to have blocks of 2640

bytes, consisting of 20 records of 132 bytes. You could do the following:

FILE LL;DEV=TAPE;LABEL=000001,IBM;REC=-132,20,F,ASCII

FILE IBMDATA;REC=-132,F,ASCII;DISC=12000,32

FCOPY FROM=*LL;TO=*IBMDATA;NEW;EBCDICIN

You need an estimate of the amount of data on the tape. If you underestimate, the disk

ﬁle ﬁlls up and FCOPY terminates, leaving some data unread. If you overestimate, you

waste some disk space, but you can reduce the amount wasted if you specify a large

number of extents (32 in the example).

NOTE

If you are translating data from EBCDIC to ASCII, use the EXCLUDE option to

ensure that "Packed Fields (comp-3)" are not translated. For more

information, refer to the SUBSET function.