On Thu, Jun 12, 2003 at 05:31:39PM -0700, Fargusson.Alan wrote: > The mt command is designed to control a tape drive. An allocate > command would be used to gain access to a tape drive, and prevent > others from using it. Perhaps this seems like a fine point, but I > prefer to separate the functionality.
I guess I'm puzzled about what the distinction is. Allocation (IMHO) seems to be a tape control function -- it's clearly discrete from reading and writing the data on the tape, and 'mt' contains every other function that is not directly related to reading and writing the tape. All mt does is execute ioctl's to control tape function, just like the TSO ALLOCATE command performs the standard allocation functions driven by a chunk of command line code. How is this any different?
