tarscan  --  a news archive tape scanner

This program reads a tar-format news archive tape and writes to 
standard out a list of file names and Subject: lines.  It was written 
on a VAX running Ultrix.  I suspect (but do not know) that the format 
of tar tapes may differ on other varieties of Unix.  I wrote this 
program for my own use and have no excuse for any sloppy code you may 
find herein.  You can do anything you like with this code.  If you 
significantly enhance it, or know of some faster/easier way to do the 
same thing, drop me a note.

To build the program, just compile it.  There's no makefile.

The program takes no arguments.  The name of the tape device is
hard-coded.  An obvious enhancement would be to use argv[1] as the file
to open.  That's an exercise for the reader.  I usually pipe tarscan's
output into a file with a name that relates to the tape being scanned.
That way I can grep around in my tarscan listings and get a list telling
me the tape to mount, the files to load from the tape, and the subject
lines from the articles of interest.  It helps to scan new archive tapes
on a regular basis so you don't have to process a half dozen of them
before you can start looking for that particular article that's going to
save your life.

One side note.  I have scanned about a year and a half of news tapes.
The resulting tables of contents occupy about 5Mb!  You better believe
it takes a while to grep through that much stuff.

Have fun!
Paul Allen

