2 .\" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
3 .\" "THE BEER-WARE LICENSE" (Revision 42):
4 .\" <phk@FreeBSD.org> wrote this file. As long as you retain this notice you
5 .\" can do whatever you want with this stuff. If we meet some day, and you think
6 .\" this stuff is worth it, you can buy me a beer in return. Poul-Henning Kamp
7 .\" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
12 .Dd September 16, 1993
17 .Nd format and write floppy disks
27 utility formats and writes one and more floppy disks.
28 Any floppy disk device capable of formatting can be used.
32 utility will ask the user
35 to insert a new floppy and press return.
36 The device will then be opened, and queried for its parameters,
37 then each track will be formatted, written with data from the
39 read back and compared.
40 When the floppy disk is filled, the process is repeated, with the next disk.
41 This continues until the program is interrupted or EOF is encountered on the
44 The options are as follows:
45 .Bl -tag -width 10n -offset indent
47 Toggle verbosity on stdout.
51 is opened first time the format will be printed.
52 During operation progress will be reported with the number of tracks
53 remaining on the current floppy disk, and the letters I, Z, F, W,
54 R and C, which indicates completion of Input, Zero-fill, Format
55 Write, Read and Compare of current track respectively.
57 Do not ask for presence of a floppy disk in the drive.
58 This non-interactive flag
59 is useful for shell scripts.
62 If none is given, stdin is assumed.
64 The name of the floppy device to write to.
71 utility actually closes the
73 while it waits for the user to press return,
74 it is thus quite possible to use the drive for other purposes at this
75 time and later resume writing with the next floppy.
77 The parameters returned from
79 are used for formatting.
80 If custom formatting is needed, please use
87 was planned as a tool to make life easier when writing a set of floppies,
88 one such use could be to write a tar-archive:
90 .Dl "tar cf - . | gzip -9 | fdwrite -d /dev/fd0.1720 -v
92 The main difference from using
94 multivolume facility is of course the formatting of the floppies, which
95 here is done on the fly,
96 thus reducing the amount of work for the floppy-jockey.
102 utility was written while waiting for ``make world'' to complete.
103 Some of the code was taken from
106 The program has been contributed by
107 .An Poul-Henning Kamp Aq phk@FreeBSD.org .
109 Diagnostics are less than complete at present.
111 If a floppy is sick, and the
113 is seekable, it should ask the user to frisbee the disk, insert
114 another, and rewind to the right spot and continue.
116 This concept could be extended to cover non-seekable input also
117 by employing a temporary file.
119 An option (defaulting to zero) should allow the user to ask for
120 retries in case of failure.
122 At present a suitable tool for reading back a multivolume set
123 of floppies is missing.
126 for instance, will do the job, if the data has not been compressed.
129 to help out in this situation of course.