For reasons best not described here, 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'.
The output of 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 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.
A typical sequence would be:
vmsprep - tree1 tree2 file | ansitape cln trees -
Then on a VMS machine
mount MFA0: trees
copy MFA0:*.*.* *
@UNPACK
UNPACK.COM
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.
Since vmsprep uses find(1) internally, it does not follow symbolic links.
The exclusion of RCS and SCCS files should be controlled by a command line flag.
Assumes VMS v4.0 or greater for long file names.