Newswire Classic

By John Burke

It is probably more and more likely that, as the years pass by, you will discover a STORE tape and wonder when it was created. Therefore it is a good idea to review how to do this. I started out writing “how to easily do this,” but realized there is nothing easy about it — since it is not well-documented and if you just want the creation date, you have to do a bit of a kludge to get it. Why not something better?

It turns out the ;LISTDIR option of RESTORE is the best you can do. But if you do not want a list of all the files on the tape, you need to feed the command the name of some dummy, non-existent file. ;LISTDIR will also display the command used to create the tape.

By the way, this only works with NMSTORE tapes. For example, when ;LISTDIR is used on a SYSDUMP tape that also stored files, you get something like this (note that even though you are using the RESTORE command, if it contains the ;LISTDIR option, nothing is actually restored):

:restore *t;dummy;listdir

>> TURBO-STORE/RESTORE VERSION C.65.19 B5151AA <<

RESTORE *t;dummy;LISTDIR
FRI, DEC 31, 2004, 3:22 PM
RESTORE SKIPPING SLT IN PROGRESS ON LDEV 7

MPE/iX MEDIA DIRECTORY
MEDIA NAME : STORE/RESTORE-HP/3000.MPEXL 
MEDIA VERSION : MPE/iX 08.50 FIXED ASCII
MEDIA NUMBER : 1

MEDIA CREATION DATE
WED, MAY 7, 2003, 7:06 AM

SYSGEN ^SLTZDUMP.INDIRECT;*SYSGTAPE;LDEV=7;
REELNUM=1;SLTDATE=52863;TIME=117839624

MEDIA CREATED WITH THE FOLLOWING OPTIONS
OPTION DIRECTORY
OPTION ONVS
…