Name
diskseek, diskseekd - disk seek daemon; simulates Messy Dos’ drive
cleaning effect
Note
This manpage has been automatically generated from fdutils’s texinfo
documentation. However, this process is only approximative, and some
items, such as crossreferences, footnotes and indices are lost in this
translation process. Indeed, these items have no appropriate
representation in the manpage format. Moreover, only the items
specific to each command have been translated, and the general
information about fdutils has been dropped in the manpage version.
Thus I strongly advise you to use the original texinfo doc.
* To generate a printable copy from the texinfo doc, run the
following commands:
./configure; make dvi; dvips fdutils.dvi
* To generate a html copy, run:
./configure; make html
A premade html can be found at:
‘http://www.tux.org/pub/knaff/fdutils’
* To generate an info copy (browsable using emacs’ info mode),
run:
./configure; make info
The texinfo doc looks most pretty when printed or as html. Indeed, in
the info version certain examples are difficult to read due to the
quoting conventions used in info.
Description
Several people have noticed that Linux has a bad tendency of killing
floppy drives. These failures remained completely mysterious, until
somebody noticed that they were due to huge layers of dust accumulating
in the floppy drives. This cannot happen under Messy Dos, because this
excuse for an operating system is so unstable that it crashes roughly
every 20 minutes (actually less if you are running Windows). When
rebooting, the BIOS seeks the drive, and by doing this, it shakes the
dust out of the drive mechanism. diskseekd simulates this effect by
seeking the drive periodically. If it is called as diskseek, the drive
is seeked only once.
Options
The syntax for diskseekd is as follows:
diskseekd [-d drive] [-i interval] [-p pidfile]
-d drive
Selects the drive to seek. By default, drive 0 (‘/dev/fd0’) is
seeked.
-i interval
Selects the cleaning interval, in seconds. If the interval is
0, a single seek is done. This is useful when calling diskseek
from a crontab. The default is 1000 seconds (about 16 minutes)
for diskseekd and 0 for diskseek.
-p pidfile
Stores the process id of the diskseekd daemon into pidfile
instead of the default ‘/var/run/diskseekd.pid’.
Bugs
1. Other aspects of Messy Dos’ flakiness are not simulated.
2. This section lacks a few smileys.
See Also
Fdutils’ texinfo doc