Under OS, the TM device (MT in RSX) would look like a DOS-formatted tape (so one can use FLX to extract
the files). Alternatives to the DOS11 switch value are ANSI-RSX11, ANSI-VMS or ANSI-RT11, any of which
can be used to read the tape directly by PIP, if in RSX (but for binary files, it can be challenging)...
For UNIX, -F TAR creates a TAR-formatted tape from the list of files on the fly.
The same works for any tape drive (TQ = DU in RSX, TS = MS in RSX etc).
While this feature does not seem to be supported by the version of simh included with PiDP11 simulator (client11),
it can be used to prep a disk image offline (in a separate instance, with newer simh), then to attach it to PiDP11,
and copy files over, from disk to disk.
P.S. Help from SIMH:
Attach command switches
-R Attach Read Only.
-E Must Exist (if not specified, the default behavior is to
attempt to create the indicated virtual tape file).
-N Create a new empty tape container file.
-Q Suppress informative messages during attach activities.
-F Open the indicated tape container in a specific format
(default is SIMH, alternatives are E11, TPC, P7B, AWS, TAR,
ANSI-VMS, ANSI-RT11, ANSI-RSX11, ANSI-RSTS, ANSI-VAR, FIXED,
DOS11)
-B For TAR format tapes, the record size for data read from the
specified file. This record size will be used for all but
possibly the last record which will be what remains unread.
The default TAR record size is 10240. For FIXED format tapes
-B specifies the record size for binary data or the maximum
record size for text data
-V Display some summary information about the record structure
observed in the tape image observed during the attach
validation pass
-L Display detailed record size counts observed during attach
validation pass
-D Causes the internal tape structure information to be displayed
while the tape image is scanned.
-C Causes FIXED format tape data sets derived from text files to
be converted from ASCII to EBCDIC.
-X Extract a copy of the attached tape and convert it to a SIMH
format tape image.
Notes: ANSI-VMS, ANSI-RT11, ANSI-RSTS, ANSI-RSX11, ANSI-VAR formats allows
one or several files to be presented to as a read only ANSI Level 3
labeled tape with file labels that make each individual file
accessible directly as files on the tape.
FIXED format will present the contents of a file (text or binary) as
fixed sized records/blocks with ascii text data optionally converted
to EBCDIC.
DOS11 format will present the contents of a file preceeded by a DOS11
14-byte header. All files will be owned by [1,1], have a default
protection of <233> and a date in the range 1972 - 1999 with the
month/day layout as the current year. The file name on the tape
will be sanitized to contain only alphanumeric characters from the
original source file name. Characters 7 - 9 of the file name will be
placed in an otherwise unused word in the header which some DEC
operating systems will be able to process. If the resulting
filename is NULL, a filename in the range 000000 - 999999 will be
generated based of the file position on the tape.
Examples:
sim> ATTACH TM -F ANSI-VMS Hobbyist-USE-ONLY-VA.TXT
sim> ATTACH TM -F ANSI-RSX11 *.TXT,*.ini,*.exe
sim> ATTACH TM -FX ANSI-RSTS RSTS.tap *.TXT,*.SAV
sim> ATTACH TM -F ANSI-RT11 *.TXT,*.TSK
sim> ATTACH TM -FB FIXED 80 SOMEFILE.TXT
sim> ATTACH TM -F DOS11 *.LDA,*.TXT