Tapespec

Lists of on-media parts are sometimes passed around in a "tapespec", implemented in common-src/tapelist.c and perl/Amanda/Util.{swg,pod}. Older code referred to this as a tapelist, which can be confused with the tapelist file (which, naturally enough, is implemented in server-src/tapefile.c).

A tapespec is a semicolon-separated list of volumes, where each volume is specified as a label, a colon, and a comma-separated list of file numbers on that volume. For example:

 Conf-001:1

or

 Conf-001:3,4,5,9,11;Conf-002:1,2,3

Semicolon, colon, comma, and backslash are escaped with a backslash if they appear in a label.

File numbers are sorted in numerical order.

Sometimes the specification is abused by putting things that aren't labels in it:

/A/p/hold\:ing/20100205181319/euclid._A_p_etc.1:0