Finding MTS components from the driver file

The driver listing file contains details of all MTS components that are available on the distribution tapes. It can be found in the file doc/D6.0-LIST.txt on your host operating system after unzipping the distribution.

Each component has one or more sub-components which represent individual files. For example, 528 is the component for the Algol-W compiler and it has 66 sub-components; 548 is the component for the *FS program and it has 9 sub-components. Individual items are identified as component/sub-component, eg 548/9.

The driver listing has 2 or 3 lines per sub-component giving details like file type, location and size followed by a more detailed description.

Unpacking the file

To make browsing the driver file easier I’ve converted the file to a tab-separated format, one line per sub-component, which you can download here. This can then easily be loaded into a spreadsheet or database for viewing.

The Perl code I wrote to do this can be found at this Github gist - it could be adapted to produce output in a different format if needed.

Example: the *FS program

Let’s look at component 548, the *FS program itself, in more detail. The subname field gives a brief description of each file, with a longer write-up in description. type indicates the type of file: the first letter is the class, eg S for source code, O for object files; further letters give more details, so type SA is assembler source code, type SF is Fortran source code etc.

If the sub-component is on the disk already, its filename will be given in the disk_name column; if it has to be restored from tape this will be blank. So for component 548 we can see the Makefile (548/1), compiled program (548/8) and helpfile (548/9) are on the disk already; the other components, which are source or object files, are not.

The tape_6250 and file_6250 show where to find these files in the distribution tape. So for these items they can be found on 6.0T2 files 478-486, and could be restored by mounting the 6.0T2 tape, running *FS and executing the command restore (478) (486).

The location column shows what file names each sub-component had when it was saved to tape; note that *FS does not use this when restoring the file so you will have to sign on to the correct user and rename files to get them to match their original location.

For example, sub-component 548/2 has location W930:FS#SA so you would need to sign on as user W930, restore the file (*FS gave it the name FS.BASE_S002 when I tried this) and then run the MTS command $rename FS.BASE_S002 FS#SA.

Further information

See the file D6.0-NOTES.txt in the MTS distribution documentation for further information on the driver file list format.

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