Ansitape reads, writes, and creates magtapes conforming to the ANSI standard for magtape labelling.
Various options modify the format of the output tape.
The list of files on the command line is written to the tape. Normally, regular text files are to be exchanged. The newline character at the end of each line is removed, and the file is written in a variable-length record format. Variable-format files have the length of the longest record specified in a file header. Therefore, ansitape will read each input file from disk before it goes on to tape, to determine the maximum record size.