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HP OpenVMS Systemsask the wizard |
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The Question is: I am uncertain of the OpenVMS version number. The system is run by our data provider and I do not have access to that information at this time. This is my situation. My data provider has been sending us information for the past several years on 3480 tapes. They simply use the VMS copy command to copy a whole directory of files to the device which is the 3480 tape drive. These files are ASCII text files. We then take these tapes and read them onto a UNIX machine ( Solaris 2.6 ) using the dd command. Now our data provider wishes to simply burn CDs each month, instead of the tapes. They ftp the same text files to a PC and create the CDROM for us. However these files look different internally. The files we received on tape have within them numerous 4 digit codes that preceed a group of characters. These 4 digit codes tell us exactly how long that line of data is, including the for digit code. For example, if we saw "0008Test0006me", we would kn ow that we had a line with "Test" on it and another with "me" on it. We wrote code to parse this data based on the existence of these 4 digit codes. Also, the files are in 2Kb blocks, which are padded with carets, "^". The problem is that when we receive the data files on CD instead of tape, these 4 digit codes are no longer there. Our provider tells us that when they view the files on their VAX or their PC, they do not see the 4 digit codes. Could the VMS copy command be doing something to these text files when it copies them to tape? Something that would be translated behind the scenes if the file were to be viewed again on another VMS system? If you can provide any insight at all into this situation I would greatly appreciate it. I thank you very much for your time. Scott T. McColl Bell & Howell Publishing Services The Answer is : You will need to work out this file transfer and the resulting file transfer format issues with your data provider -- something has quite obviously changed, and most likely this involves changes to the tools and the environment that your data provider is using to generate the data files for you. This may well simply be a case of having accessed an ANSI tape volume using a tool that directly reads both the ANSI file structure and the data using raw (low-level) operations. As the disk is not using the ANSI tape file structure, a tool that expects this structure will have corresponding problems reading the data.
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