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 .\" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
9 .\" $FreeBSD: src/usr.sbin/fdwrite/fdwrite.1,v 1.12.2.7 2003/03/12 22:08:14 trhodes Exp $
10 .\" $DragonFly: src/usr.sbin/fdwrite/fdwrite.1,v 1.2 2003/06/17 06:29:53 dillon Exp $
13 .Dd September 16, 1993
18 .Nd format and write floppy disks
28 utility formats and writes one and more floppy disks.
29 Any floppy disk device capable of formatting can be used.
33 utility will ask the user
36 to insert a new floppy and press return.
37 The device will then be opened, and queried for its parameters,
38 then each track will be formatted, written with data from the
40 read back and compared.
41 When the floppy disk is filled, the process is repeated, with the next disk.
42 This continues until the program is interrupted or EOF is encountered on the
45 The options are as follows:
46 .Bl -tag -width 10n -offset indent
48 Toggle verbosity on stdout.
52 is opened first time the format will be printed.
53 During operation progress will be reported with the number of tracks
54 remaining on the current floppy disk, and the letters I, Z, F, W,
55 R and C, which indicates completion of Input, Zero-fill, Format
56 Write, Read and Compare of current track respectively.
58 Don't ask for presence of a floppy disk in the drive.
59 This non-interactive flag
60 is useful for shell scripts.
62 Input file to read. If none is given, stdin is assumed.
64 The name of the floppy device to write to. Default is
70 utility actually closes the
72 while it waits for the user to press return,
73 it is thus quite possible to use the drive for other purposes at this
74 time and later resume writing with the next floppy.
76 The parameters returned from
78 are used for formatting.
79 If custom formatting is needed, please use
86 was planned as a tool to make life easier when writing a set of floppies,
87 one such use could be to write a tar-archive:
89 .Dl "tar cf - . | gzip -9 | fdwrite -d /dev/fd0.1720 -v
91 The main difference from using
93 multivolume facility is of course the formatting of the floppies, which
94 here is done on the fly,
95 thus reducing the amount of work for the floppy-jockey.
101 utility was written while waiting for ``make world'' to complete.
102 Some of the code was taken from
105 The program has been contributed by
106 .An Poul-Henning Kamp Aq phk@FreeBSD.org .
108 Diagnostics are less than complete at present.
110 If a floppy is sick, and the
112 is seekable, it should ask the user to frisbee the disk, insert
113 another, and rewind to the right spot and continue.
115 This concept could be extended to cover non-seekable input also
116 by employing a temporary file.
118 An option (defaulting to zero) should allow the user to ask for
119 retries in case of failure.
121 At present a suitable tool for reading back a multivolume set
122 of floppies is missing.
125 for instance, will do the job, if the data has not been compressed.
128 to help out in this situation of course.