diskseekd(1)

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, this 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