Today on Slashdot someone had a question about getting data off of an old Xenix server. A few years ago I did a consulting job for a customer who had an old Xenix server with no ethernet card that needed to get some data for the State Police. The server ran an old database that kept track of training records and they needed that information in order to “webify” the process.

I wish I could remember the ins and outs of the problem. I gave the customer a write up of how I did it and the problems I had getting the usr directory off of the system. Unfortunately I can’t find the report.

Regardless, it was an interesting project, here is the script that eventually worked:

#!/bin/sh

for I in bin boot dos etc lib oa.files once shlib tmp u unit57 unit58 unit59 usr xenix
do
	echo "tar -cf - $I|uuencode -"
	tar -cf - $I|uuencode -
done

tar -cf - `find /usr -type f -print` >2/usr.err|uuencode -


for I in `cat usr.txt`
do
	tar -cf - $I |uuencode -
done