Team

Portable multi-buffered tape streaming utility

Submitted-By pcg@aber.ac.uk Piercarlo Grandi Posting-Number Volume 27, Issue 195 Archive-Name team/part01

There exist a few filters that help tapes streams by buffering IO and allowing reads to overlaps with writes under Unix. Most of these filters rely on relatively unportable features, for example SYSV like shared memory.

team is a filter that runs essentially unchanged on any Unix version, as it relies only on features present in V7. A number of team processes team members share a common input fd and a common output fd, and they take turns at reading from the former and writing to the latter; they synchronize by using a ring of pipes between them, where a “read-enable” and a “write-enable” token circulate.

The team source is GPL’ed, and it comes with no warranty.