The tapecntl command is used to manipulate the tape device directly. Some commands will not work on all tape drives as each tape drive supports slightly different subsets of all the potential scsi tape commands. Common tapecntl commands are:
tapecntl -r - Reset the tape drive
tapecntl -w - Rewind the tape.
tapecntl -u - Eject the tape.
tapecntl -C - List the hardware compression setting
tapecntl -c 3 - Enable all hardware compression
tapecntl -c 0 - Disable all hardware compression
tapecntl -v - Set the drive to read/write in variable block lengths
tapecntl -f 512 - Set the drive back to r/w in 512 byte block lengths!
The default tape i/o block length for r/w is fixed at 512 bytes. The default tape device that all the above commands refer to is ntape1. To use one of these commands like reset, I would type:
tapecntl -r /dev/rmt/ntape1
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