Several folks pointed out that the exetoc program that I was trying to

use was intended for use with an Exabyte on a Delta Microsystems

device driver, rather than the Sun dev. driver.

Several people thought you could do similar things with the Sun device

driver. George Goble at Purdue mentioned that under SunOS 4.0.3 you

could still fool the Sun driver into writing data without an EOF if

you preceeded the rewind with ioctl to skip 1 file mark backward (eg,

write data, bsfm 1, rewind, close). He didn't know whether it would

work under 4.1, and I haven't tried it, so I can't tell you either.

Didn't sound like it was something one could count on in future

releases.

I was looking for a generic, reliable, relatively portable way of

rewriting a file at the start of the tape without disturbing the rest

of the tape - admittedly, this is asking for alot. I was hoping to

find a way to do it without relying upon strange quirks of the

existing drivers or buying new drivers. I think my hope was in vain,

so I've given up my search.

Thanks to those who responded...

--- Steve