Allocating and Mounting Tape Drives

Similar problems occur when allocating and mounting tape drives. $ ALLOCATE will allocate the device to the DCL subprocess. This may be what you want, for example, if you are going to use another DCL command (such as BACKUP) to read or write the tape. However if the tape is to be processed using a FIGARO command it must be allocated to the process running ICL.

A set of commands has been provided for this purpose as follows:

command	abbreviation	function
ALLOC dev	ALL	allocate a device
MOUNT dev	MOU	mount a device
DISMOUNT dev	DISMOU	dismount a device
DEALLOC dev	DEALL	deallocate a device

Mount performs a MOUNT/FOREIGN at the tapes initialized density. It does not provide the many qualifiers of the DCL command. There are several additional optional parameters for some of these commands. ALLOC may specify a generic name, and the name of the device actually allocated will be returned in the optional second parameter.

    ICL> ALL MT
    _MTA0: Allocated
    ICL> ALL MT (DEVICE)
    _MTA1: Allocated
    ICL> =DEVICE
    _MTA1:

DISMOUNT has an optional parameter which is used to specify that the tape be dismounted without unloading.

    ICL> DISMOU MTA1 NOUNLOAD