8.1 Introduction

This Section describes the miscellaneous utility subroutines and functions available in the VICAR run-time library. The subroutines described in this Section may not conform to all the software standards established in the rest of the manual. In particular, some routines require either FORTRAN or C formatted strings. Those requirements are indicated on a routine by routine basis.
The routines x/zvfilpos, x/zvtpinfo, x/zvtpmode, and x/zvtpset are used to directly manipulate 9-track tapes from within a program. The use of tapes in this way directly from a program is problematic under UNIX, so it is discouraged. While this method of access is allowed, the underlying implementation is not portable. It currently only runs on Sun-4s with one brand of tape drive. All processing should be done from disk files, with only operating system or special-purpose utilities accessing the tape (these utilities would only transfer files to/from tape, with no processing).