Table of Contents
NOS Utilities 1.1.1
First General Release
REWRITE Notice
The functionality parallels that of other utilities but this is a complete rewrite of all of the older functionality to address the collection of exceptions that have been discovered over the years, and are incorporated into dtCyber as well.
The functions were refactored completely and the result is the capability to (when combined with the NOS.IO backup functionality), construct, restore and share tape images between storage formats of PLATO files.
Overview
While dtCyber was being developed, some tools were written to help facilitate the creation and manipulation of the tape and disk containers. Today, it is more practical to maintain the collection of tools as a single command-line tool. Nearly all functionality has been rewritten into a single command line utility: nosutils
Features / Status
The nosutils tool is built to provide the following functions (Details may be found later in this article.):
- Tape Assembly/Disassembly Fully-Functional
This feature “unpacks” a tape file from is internal record format into workstation-based files which may be further modified/manipulated/transformed. Those workstation-based files may then be reconstituted into the.tap(tape file) format using arecipefile as the construction guide.
- Workstation File Conversion (bi-directional) Fully-Functional
Files may be converted from/to any of the following forms:- Big-Endian, 60-bit binary
- Little-Endian, 64-bit binary format files containing representations of the 60-bit CM Word
- CDC Display Code
About Display Code Representation
Data representation in this form is exactly 10 ascii characters per CM Word (6-bit cdc “bytes” = 1 8-bit ascii character). The character set permitted is:
o00-07 ':', 'a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g' o10-17 'h', 'i', 'j', 'k', 'l', 'm', 'n', 'o' o20-27 'p', 'q', 'r', 's', 't', 'u', 'v', 'w' o30-37 'x', 'y', 'z', '0', '1', '2', '3', '4' o40-47 '5', '6', '7', '8', '9', '+', '-', '*' o50-57 '/', '(', ')', '$', '=', ' ', ',', '.' o60-67 '#', '[', ']', '%', '"', '_', '!', '&' o70-77 '\'', '?', '<', '>', '@', '\\', '^', ';'with upper-case equivalents of the characters 'a' through 'z' being translated to to their lower-case counterparts.
All other ASCII characters are treated as the cdc representation for
6-bits of zero(as if the character specified was:).
- Catalog Under Development/Incomplete
Attempts to approximate the output of the NOSITEMIZEcommand.
- Create Fully-Functional
Enables the 'quick' creation of a tape using workstation-based files as input.
- Dump Fully-Functional
Produces a block-by-block dump of an input tape container.
- Fix Fully-Functional
See the Fix detail page for warnings and details.
- Verify Fully-Functional
Verifies the integrity of the tape container file as well as the expected sequence numbers / checksums for each tape logical block.