The -L option lets you provide a label of up to 63 characters for your archive. There are two ways of providing this label to BRU. The first is to simply specify the label from the command line as shown below.
bru -cv -L “Test Label” /usr/bin
bru -c -L “Old Mail 1” -vvvv letter* memo*
The second method of passing a label string to BRU, is to create a file and tell BRU to read that file. BRU will read in the first 63 characters of the file as the label for the tape as shown below.
bru -c -L “/tmp/label name” /usr/bin
The label information appears in the archive header, which can be viewed (or fed to an archive manager program) using BRU’s -g option. NOTE: That the label string and file name are enclosed in a pair of double quotes. This assures that any shell program you might be running (sh, bash, csh, ksh, tsh, zsh) will treat the label as a single parameter. If the label is not enclosed in double quotes, BRU will see the individual components of the label string as separate parameters. In the second case, Old would become the label, and each of the words in the rest of the label would be treated as a file name. The following shows how -g mode is used to read the label information:
bru -g -f oldmail
In this example, oldmail is a standard UNIX file we are using in place of a device to receive the archived mail files. See Chapter 16, “Archive Inspection and Verification,” and Appendix C, “The BRU Manual Page” for a description of the -g option.