*BSD News Article 36536


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Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.bugs
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!msuinfo!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!EU.net!uknet!festival!edcogsci!richard
From: richard@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Richard Tobin)
Subject: Re: Floppy disks in FreeBSD 1.1.5.1
Message-ID: <Cx5MzJ.7I@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: HCRC, University of Edinburgh
References: <CwrHEK.E6B@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> <36kbbuINNhj6@bonnie.sax.de>
Date: Tue, 4 Oct 1994 15:28:31 GMT
Lines: 31

In article <36kbbuINNhj6@bonnie.sax.de> j@uriah.sax.de (J Wunsch) writes:
>>(2) Writes to /dev/rfd0 that are not a multiple of 512 bytes produce
>>    an error.  This results in "tar zcf /dev/rfd0" failing.  This worked
>>    in 1.1R.

>You are wrong with the term "worked". They didn't work at all, they
>have been broken all the time.

It worked in the obvious straightforward sense of "worked": if I wrote
tar files using this method I could read them back.

>some program writing random garbage | dd conv=sync obs=<multiple of secsize> \
>         > /dev/rfd...                                 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Tar should do this itself.  After all, its traditional default output
is /dev/rmt8.

>tar -cvz --block-compress -f /dev/rfd... bla foo mumble

I'll try that.

Someone else said I should use the block device instead of the raw
device.  This is counter-intuitive to say the least: the problem is
that I don't want to write blocks!  Is this guaranteed to work?

-- Richard
-- 
Richard Tobin, HCRC, Edinburgh University                 R.Tobin@ed.ac.uk

Ooooh!  I didn't know we had a king.  I thought we were an
autonomous collective.