.TH VMSPREP LOCAL "4/10/85 UCB Local"
.SH NAME
vmsprep - VMS tape preperation aid
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B vmsprep
[-] [name ...]
.SH DESCRIPTION
.I Vmsprep
traverses hierarchies of files and prepares them for
transportation to VMS.
Since ANSI stardard tapes (the VMS standard) do
not allow hierarchy, this program provides a
method of flattening the hierarchy onto a tape
in such a way that it can be unpacked on VMS
to recreate the same tree structure.
.PP
For reasons best not described here,
.I vmsprep
will attempt to exclude all RCS and SCCS archives by
ignoring all files or directories named 'RCS' or 'SCCS', or
files starting with 's.' or ending in ',v'.
.PP
The output of 
.I vmsprep
is a pair of files vmsprep.namelist and UNPACK.COM.
vmsprep.namelist is a list of files to be placed on
the tape in the format required by 
.I ansitape.
If the first argument is '-' instead of a file or directory name,
vmsprep will instead send the namelist to standard output, and
place UNPACK.COM in /tmp to avoid attempting to write in the
current directory.
All of the files except UNPACK.COM will
be placed on the tape under cryptic names.
UNPACK.COM is a VMS command script which will recreate
all of the necessary directories and then move the
cryptically named files to their proper place.
.PP
A typical sequence would be:
.br
.RS
vmsprep - tree1 tree2 file | ansitape cln trees -
.RE
.br
.I Then on a VMS machine
.br
.RS
mount MFA0: trees
.br
copy MFA0:*.*.* *
.br
@UNPACK
.RE
.br
.SH FILES
vmsprep.namelist
.br
UNPACK.COM
.br
.SH DIAGNOSTICS
A warning is reported if a file or directory name contains
a character not permitted in VMS names. 
The offending character is replaced by 'Z' and 
.I vmsprep
continues.
.br
.SH "SEE ALSO"
ansitape(l)
.SH BUGS
Extra periods in file names may not be dealt with optimally.
.br
All files and directories to be moved must be descendants of the
current working directory.  Absolute path names and paths containing ".."
will produce unpredictable results.
.br
Since vmsprep uses find(1) internally, it does not follow symbolic links.
.br
The exclusion of RCS and SCCS files should be controlled by a command line flag.
.br
Assumes VMS v4.0 or greater for long file names.
.br