The utilities described in this manual were originally developed for the CERN VAXcluster VXCERN.
Several essential features were felt to be missing from standard VAX tape handling utlities. The most important of these were
To this end, a new utility was written, known as SETUP. This command, which uses standard VAX/VMS system services, performs device allocation, tape mounting and label checking.
This command was soon joined by the other utilities described in this manual, namely LABELDUMP, STAGE, TAPECOPY, WRTAPE and XTAPE.
An interface to the CERN Tape Management System exists, and is activated at installation time as described in the installation chapter of this manual.
In addition, and interface from the FATMEN File and Tape Management system is also provided. Further details can be found in the FATMEN manual [3].
Originally, the commands described in this manual were defined using the DCL SET COMMAND utility. However, they have recently been rewritten so that this is no longer required, using the techniques described in [5].