While we're handing out kudos, a misunderstanding on my part about
how tar would handle /dev/nrst0 led to my creating about 50,000 files in
a directory while I was at dinner last night.  I removed them.  The system
worked fine.  (Before I did the rm -r, I tried 'rm tapelist.4????' and it
seemed fine.)

Nice work!  A lot of systems won't survive that sort of flagrant, stupid
abuse.

-s