Reading Tapes
Peter Hansen
peter at engcorp.com
Mon Aug 13 23:36:38 EDT 2001
Juan Huertas wrote:
>
> Hi all.
>
> My pc has a DAT tape (Windows 2000 Tape0) and i need to read the content of
> a tape with unix format, using low level I'ts possible to read from the
> device inside python?.
>
> I try:
>
> dat=open('\\.\Tape0','rb').read()
>
> but the system does not open the file (ilegal file name: \\.\Tape0).
Why did you believe \.\TAPE0 was a valid file name in the first
place? I don't know W2K, but under previous versions of that
operating system that file name is just equivalent to \TAPE0,
meaning it would have to look like a file in the root directory
(of the current drive, maybe C:, maybe not). I'm not expert on
tape drives under W2K, but I suspect that's not the case.
This may not be a Python question, unless you can successfully
access the drive as a file using some other program. Can
you just use "TYPE \\.\TAPE0" and get something? I doubt it.
Or is this a way of referring to a shared device named \TAPE0
under the current computer (using \\. instead of \\COMPUTERNAME)?
I've never seen that before, and it isn't valid under W98.
I'm also suspicious as to whether a DAT tape under W2K would
look like a file at all. Usually Windows tape drives end
up being available only through special device drivers to
applications which know about tapes. *Unix* is prone to
making all things look like files, so maybe you've taken
what was a valid path under Unix and tried to use it under
W2K? (i.e. the original device was addressed as /./tape0
under Unix?) That wouldn't work either.
I don't like posting something so fundamentally unhelpful,
but nobody else beat me to it ... :)
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